Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 9, No. 42, May 1947

The Tracy Enigma by Georges Simenon

(Translated by Anthony Boucher)

’Tec tintype of Georges Simenon: Born in Liege, Belgium; reporter on the Liège “Gazette” at the age of sixteen; published his first novel, AU PONT DES ARCHES (ABOARD THE ARK), at seventeen; married at twenty and moved to Paris. In the next ten years, between the ages of twenty and thirty, Georges Simenon published no less than two hundred popular novels under sixteen pseudonyms! Imagine that — twenty novels a year for a full decade! And they said Edgar Wallace was prolific! Why, no English or American writer, past or present, holds a candle to Simenon on sheer productivity! True, these two hundred novels were not detective stories — his first detective boo\ was written after (shall we call it?) the apprenticeship of ten score novels; but once Georges Simenon began to invade the Coast of Criminalia, he produced a full-length Inspector Maigret novel at the incredible rate of one each month! What Simenon did in his spare time is not recorded, and while some of his books reveal the unavoidable singe of jet-propulsion, the great body of his detective work in print is of a high order of excellence. Simenon is a master of mood, as even the following episode in the career of detective G.7 so clearly proves...

From the book “Les 13 Enigmes,” copyright 1932, by A. Fayard et Cie.

The telephone rang one night around eleven, and we decided to take the train an hour later. These are, in brief, the facts that led G.7 to this sudden decision:

That very day, at four in the afternoon, the inhabitants of Tracy, a very small village on the banks of the Loire, saw the body of a young girl floating down the river.

They fished it out from a small boat. Though there was no sign of life, a vineyard worker drove off to Pouilly to fetch a doctor, who worked in vain at artificial respiration for two hours.

The girl did not revive. No one recognized her. The mayor was away. The Rural Guard was not available, there were no police. The police corporal from Pouilly was on his rounds through the region and couldn’t arrive until the next day.

The railroad watchman had a small unused shack behind his house. They put the body there. At sundown the crowds dispersed.

Around ten in the evening the watchman left his house to signal a freight train. As he passed by the shack where the body had been laid, he was astonished to observe that the door, which he himself had closed, was ajar.

Frightened, he sought out his wife. They approached with a lantern, peered through the opening...

The body had vanished! There was nothing in the shack!

We reached the town by six in the morning, and from the station we could see the shack and the peasants excitedly clustered about it.

The village of Tracy lies on the right bank of the Loire, at a spot where the river widens and is bestrewn with large sand islands. Across from the village you can see the chateau of Sancerre; but it’s a long way around to the suspension bridge which leads to the chateau and to Saint-Satur, so that the village is relatively isolated.

The people whom we could see were almost all workers from the vineyards. Some of them, alerted by the watchman, had spent the night on the road on the lookout for the police.

The Pouilly police had arrived shortly before us. Now they were engaged in general questioning which was producing confused results.

One fact was certain: The girl, after two hours of artificial respiration, had shown no sign of life, and the doctor had unhesitatingly signed the death certificate.

But one old boatman had troubled the spirits of his listeners by relating the story of a curious event he had once witnessed: The daughter of a river boatman had fallen into the stream during her father’s absence and had not been fished out till an hour later; two doctors had declared her dead; the father had come back, hurled himself on his child’s body, and devoted himself to rhythmic movements for all of ten hours; the girl finally, bit by bit, had come back to life...

It would be impossible to describe the effect of this narrative. Suddenly the people began to tremble, and the watchman kept his eyes fearfully averted from the shack.

G.7 had seen no reason to announce his official position. We were there simply as curious spectators — to listen to everything and see everything. Though it was August and the weather had been dry for two weeks, a few from the crowd were persistently trying to find prints in the hard-baked dirt of the road.

The corporal of police had no notion what to do. He kept taking notes on whatever anyone wished to tell him, and had blackened page after page of his notebook.

Around ten in the morning came the first startling development. A carriage arrived from Loges, another village much like Tracy, situated four kilometers upstream. A large woman emerged in great distress.

She cried out. She wept. She groaned. An old peasant followed her in silence.

“It was my daughter, wasn’t it?”

Someone began to describe the drowned girl and her clothes. The people argued; they couldn’t agree on the color of her hair. But there was no possible doubt: The drowned girl was Angélique Bourriau, whose parents had just arrived from Loges.

The father was so crushed by the discovery that he could not speak a word. He stared about stupidly. But the mother talked enough for two, her voice shrill and voluble.

“It’s a trick of that Gaston’s, for sure...”

People began to listen. They learned that Angélique, who was nineteen, had been smitten with a clerk in the tax office at Saint-Satur, a youth who hadn’t a sou to his name, hadn’t even performed his military service yet.

Of course the Bourriaus opposed the marriage. They had their eye on another bridegroom, a worker from the Pouilly vineyards, a solid rustic of thirty.

The marriage was to have taken place two months later.

G.7 and I were the first to reach Saint-Satur, leaving police, parents, and spectators still clustered around the empty shack.

It was eleven when we entered the Tax Collector’s office. The clerk who greeted us at the window was Gaston himself — Gaston Verdurier, to give him his proper name.

He was a tall young man of twenty, with feverish eyes and lips that trembled at the slightest emotion.

“Please come outside for a moment.”

“But...” Verdurier pointed at the clock, which was far short of the noon hour.

“Would you rather I talked here? It’s about Angélique...”

The clerk hastily seized his cap and followed us outside.

“What time was it when you left her yesterday afternoon?”

“But... What do you mean? I didn’t see her...”

“You loved her, didn’t you?”

“Yes...”

“She loved you?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t want her to belong to another?”

“It isn’t true...!”

“What? What isn’t true?”

“I didn’t kill her!”

“But you knew something about it?”

“No... Yes... They found her, didn’t they?”

“Yes, they found her. And in a few moments the police will be here...”

“Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter. What do you know? Why did you insist, before I gave any hint of my business, that you didn’t kill her?”

“Because I knew Angélique would never accept that marriage. She kept telling me she’d sooner die...”

“And you?”

We were crossing the suspension bridge. Far away we could see the red roofs of Tracy.

“Me? I was going crazy...”

“Did you work in your office yesterday afternoon? Don’t bother to lie; I can ask your boss.”

“No. I asked for time off...”

“And you saw Angélique.”

“Yes... Near Loges... We went for a walk together...”

“When you left her, she was alive?”

“Yes!”

“And you didn’t see anybody lurking around? Grosjean, for instance — that is the name of the man she was supposed to marry, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t see him...” The young man was gasping with anguish, his face sweating, his lips white. “Are we going to see her?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh... We’re going... to...” He stopped.

“Well? Haven’t you the guts to go through with it?”

“Oh, yes! I... But you’ve got to understand...” And suddenly he burst out sobbing.

G.7 let him weep. He said not another word to him until we arrived at the watchman’s house, where the crowd parted to let Gaston Verdurier through.

The young man hid his face in his hands. He asked, “Where is she?”

But already the girl’s mother was vehemently apostrophizing him and the scene was beginning to grow chaotic, at once tragic and grotesque.

The police corporal intervened. “He’ll answer for this at Pouilly!” he said, seizing the youth by the wrist.

Verdurier was mad with suffering. I think I have never seen a human face so tortured. His eyes sought ours as though he counted on us to rescue him.

“I didn’t kill her, I swear it!” he shouted as they pushed him into a cart to take him to the city.

And when the cart was a hundred meters away you could still hear his sobs.

All this had happened so rapidly and in so curious an atmosphere that I had not even tried to form an opinion of the case.

You could have shown me the girl restored to life and I shouldn’t have been surprised. You could have told me that her official fiancé had killed her and I shouldn’t have lifted an eyebrow.

It was a splendidly sunny day. The watchman’s white house glistened.

The people couldn’t decide to break up. The confusion of the parents, who had no idea even where their child’s body might be, had something intensely dramatic about it, despite the farcical sidelights of the situation.

G.7 had not yet stepped forward officially. He looked about him. He listened.

“All right,” he said suddenly to the old boatman who had told the story of the girl brought back to life. “You weren’t at Saint-Satur yesterday evening?”

“Sure. I live there.”

“And you didn’t go to the café?”

“I dropped in for a drink. But why do you want to know?”

“You told your story there?”

“What story?”

G.7 had apparently heard enough. He turned his back indifferently and signaled me to follow him.

“No hurry,” he said. “There’s a train for Pouilly at two. In the meantime we’ve time to lunch at the inn and sample the local white wine.”

“But...”

“But what?” he asked, in the most natural manner, just as though we’d come down here for a breath of country air and a taste of the local products.

So I knew that he had just reached the solution of the case.

Two hours later we sat facing Gaston. His head hung low, his glance was evasive as he obstinately defended himself against the accusations of the police captain.

There were tears in his eyes. His face was marked with purple spots. His nails were gnawed to the quick.

“I didn’t! It isn’t true!” he sobbed with a mixture of rage and humility. “I didn’t kill anybody!”

“No...” G.7’s voice was calm. “You didn’t even kill yourself...”

I was far from understanding that phrase. But Gaston started, stared at my friend sharply, with a maddened glint in his eye.

“How... how do you know...?”

There was a bitter smile on G.7’s lips, a terribly human smile.

“All I had to do was look at you and I understood. Understood that at the last moment you wouldn’t have the guts. The last kiss... the last embrace... the desire to die rather than give each other up! Angélique leaps into the river... And then you, suddenly coming to your senses, watching the body float off downstream, drawing back, standing there, motionless, a chilling fear in your heart...”

“Shut up!”

“That evening, at Saint-Satur, you drop in at the café. You need a drink to calm you. There’s a man there, telling a horrible story. They’ve fished a girl out of the river at Tracy. They think she’s dead. But he’s got his own ideas, he has. He knew a case like that once... You listen. You’re trembling all over. Maybe you imagine Angélique being buried alive... You rush outdoors. You get to Tracy. You steal the body and carry it off into the woods...

“You try to bring her back!

“At least, that’s what I want to believe. It’s better that way, isn’t it? You stole the body to redeem yourself. It wasn’t, it couldn’t have been to make sure that Angélique was dead? That she couldn’t come back and accuse you of your cowardice?”

The young man let out a cry of horror.

“But she was dead enough,” G.7 went on. “Dead for good...” He lowered his voice. “All right. Tell us where you left her.”

And outside, five minutes later, he took a deep breath and sighed. “I don’t know why... but I’d sooner have been handling a good nasty crime...”

Like me, no doubt, he felt a certain weight oppressing his chest as two policemen accompanied the twenty-year-old lover toward the woods.