The Methods of Maigret ( PDFDrive )

“Tell me Langlois… By the way, is the wife better?”
“It’s not the wife, Monsieur Maigret. It’s my mother-in-law.”
“Oh yes! Sorry. Has she had her operation?”
“She went back home yesterday.”
“Would you have a look and see if you’ve got anything under the name
Marcel Pacaud? With a ‘d’ at the end.”
Was it any better in London? You could hear the rain hammering on the roof,
cascading into the gutters.
“Marcel?” asked the clerk, perched on a ladder.
“That’s right. Pass me his file.”
Besides fingerprints, it contained a photograph, front-face view, and a profile,
without collar or tie, under the crude light of the identity department.
“Pacaud, Marcel-Joseph Etienne. Born in Le Havre, seaman…”
Frowning, Maigret tried to remember, his eyes fixed on the photographs. The
man, when they had been taken, was thirty-five. He was thin, sickly. A black
bruise below the right eye seemed to indicate that he had been interrogated
thoroughly before being placed in the hands of the photographer.
There followed a long list of convictions. At Le Havre, aged seventeen,
assault and battery. At Bordeaux, a year later, assault and battery again, with
drunkenness on the public way. Resisted arrest. Assault and battery again in a
house of ill repute in Marseilles.
Maigret held the file so as to let his English colleague read at the same time as
himself, and Mr. Pyke showed no surprise, seemed to say:
“We have that over the other side as well.”
“Living on prostitute’s earnings…”
Did they have that too? That meant Marcel Pacaud had been a pimp. And, in
the usual way, he had been sent off to do his military service in the Africa
battallions.
“Assault and battery, at Nantes…”
“Assault and battery, at Toulon ...”
“A thug,” Maigret said simply to Mr. Pyke.
Then it became more serious.
“Paris. Inveigling.”
The Englishman asked: “What’s that?”
To have to explain that to a man who belongs to a race with the reputation of