Pietr the Latvian Read online

  He did not watch the post-mortem. Dusk was near, and the doctor had announced that he had seven guests coming to dinner at Nevers. The two men were the examining magistrate and the clerk of the court. After shaking the inspector’s hand, the magistrate merely said, ‘As you can see, the local police have begun their investigations. It’s a terribly confused case.’

  The body was naked under the sheet laid over it, and the dismal conversation lasted only a few seconds. The corpse was much as Maigret would have imagined from the photo of the living man: long, bony, with a bureaucrat’s hollow chest, a pale skin that made his hair look very dark, while the body hair on his chest was reddish.

  Only half his face was still intact; the left cheek had been blown away by a gunshot.

  His eyes were open, but the mid-grey irises looked even more lifeless than in his photograph.

  He was dieting, Madame Gallet had said.

  Under his left breast there was a neat, regular wound retaining the shape of a knife-blade.

  Behind Maigret, the doctor was dancing on the spot with impatience. ‘Do I send my report to you? Where are you staying?’

  ‘At the Hôtel de la Loire.’

  The magistrate and his clerk looked elsewhere and said nothing. Maigret, looking for the way out, tried the wrong door and found himself among the benches in one of the school classrooms. It was pleasantly cool in there, and the inspector lingered for a moment in front of some lithographs entitled ‘Harvest’, ‘A Farm in Winter’ and ‘Market Day in Town’. On a shelf all the measures of weight and volume, made of wood, tin and iron, were arranged in order of size.

  The inspector mopped his face. As he left the room again, he met the police inspector from Nevers, who was looking for him.

  ‘Oh, good, there you are! Now I can join my wife in Grenoble. Would you believe it … yesterday morning when the phone call came I was about to go on holiday!’

  ‘Have you found anything out?’

  ‘Nothing at all. As you’ll see, it’s a most improbable case. If you’d like we can dine together, and I’ll give you the details, if you can call them details. Nothing was stolen. No one saw or heard anything! And it would be a clever fellow who could say why the man was killed. There’s only one oddity, but I don’t suppose it will get us very far. When he stayed at the Hôtel de la Loire, as he did from time to time, he checked in under the name of Monsieur Clément, a man of private means, from Orleans.’

  ‘Let’s go and have an aperitif,’ suggested Maigret.

  He remembered the tempting atmosphere of the terrace. Just now it had looked to him like the refuge he dreamed of. However, when he was sitting in front of an ice-cold beer, he did not feel the satisfaction he had anticipated.

  ‘This is the most disappointing imaginable case,’ sighed his companion. ‘You just take a look at it! Nothing to give us a lead! And what’s more, nothing out of the ordinary, except that the man was murdered …’

  He went on in this vein for several minutes, without noticing that the inspector was hardly listening.

  There are some people whose faces you can’t forget even if you merely passed them once in the street. All that Maigret had seen of Émile Gallet was a photograph, half of his face, and his pale body. Again, it was the photo that lingered in his mind. And he was trying to bring it to life, to imagine Monsieur Gallet having a private conversation with his wife, in the dining room at Saint-Fargeau, or leaving the villa to catch his train at the station.

  In fits and starts, the top part of the man’s face took clearer shape in his mind. Maigret thought he remembered that he had ashen bags under his eyes.

  ‘I’ll bet he had liver trouble,’ he suddenly said under his breath.

  ‘Well, he didn’t die of it, anyway!’ said his companion tartly, annoyed. ‘Liver trouble doesn’t blow off half your face and stab you through the heart!’

  The lights of a funfair came on in the middle of the square, where a carousel of wooden horses was being dismantled.