One of Maigret's old "customers", Ernestine Micou, who he'd arrested 17 years earlier, comes to Maigret to tell of her's husband's misadventure. She'd married Alfred Jussiaume, "Sad Freddie", a safecracker, and while he'd been doing a job in Neuilly, with his usual bad luck, he'd discovered the body of a dead woman and fled. When Maigret goes to the house, where a dentist, Guillaume Serre and his mother live, they claim there's been no burglarly, and of course, no murder. However Serre's Dutch wife, the former Maria Van Aerts, supposedly left on the day Alfred saw the body, returning indefinitely to Holland. The doctor explaines that the newly replaced window pane, which Alfred had presumably removed to break in, was broken in the recent storm.