The Late Monsieur Gallet Page 2

  ‘How was th … that man killed?’

  ‘The telegram doesn’t say. I gathered that he was found dead in the morning.’

  Madame Gallet jumped, and it took her a moment to get her breath back as she sat with her mouth half open.

  ‘It can’t possibly be my husband. Surely that card proves it? I shouldn’t even have had to go to all this bother.’

  Without knowing just why, Maigret regretted not bringing the photo from the piano, because he was already having trouble reconstructing the top part of the face in his mind. On the other hand, he clearly visualized the over-long mouth, the small, thick beard, the poorly cut shoulders of the jacket.

  It was seven in the evening when the train stopped at Tracy-Sancerre station, and they still had to walk a kilometre along the main road and cross the suspension bridge over the River Loire, which did not offer the majestic view of a river but the sight of a great many streams of water running fast between sandbanks the colour of over-ripe wheat. A man in a nankeen suit was fishing on one of these islets. And now the Hôtel de la Loire came into view, its yellow façade running along the bank. The rays of the sun slanted more now, but it was still difficult to breathe the air, thick with so much water vapour.

  Madame Gallet was in the lead now, and seeing a man who must be a colleague of his pacing up and down outside the hotel, Maigret disliked the thought that he and his companion looked a perfectly ridiculous couple.

  People on holiday, mostly families, wearing pale clothes, were sitting at tables under a glazed roof, with waitresses in aprons and white caps walking around.

  Madame Gallet had seen the sign bearing the name of the hotel surrounded by the crests of several clubs. She made straight for the door.

  ‘Police Judiciaire?’ asked the man pacing up and down, stopping Maigret.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘He’s been taken to the town hall. You’d better hurry up – the post-mortem is at eight. You’ll be just in time.’

  • • •

  Just in time to get acquainted with the dead man. At that moment, Maigret was still dragging himself about like a man doing a difficult and unattractive task.

  Later, he had time to remember the second point of contact at his leisure. It could not be followed by another.

  The village was glaring white in the stormy light of that late afternoon. Chickens and geese crossed the main road, and fifty metres away two men in aprons were shoeing a horse.

  Opposite the town hall, people were sitting at tables on a café terrace, and from the shade of red and yellow striped awnings rose an atmosphere of cool beer, ice cubes floating in sweet-smelling drinks and newspapers just arrived from Paris.

  Three cars were parked in the middle of the square. A nurse was looking for the pharmacy. In the town hall itself, a woman was washing down the grey-tiled corridor.

  ‘Excuse me. The body?’

  ‘Back there! In the school playground. The gentlemen are over there … you can come this way.’

  She pointed to a door with the word ‘Girls’ over it; it said ‘Boys’ above the other wing of the building.

  Madame Gallet went ahead with unexpected self-assurance, but all the same Maigret thought she was more likely in some kind of daze.

  In the school yard, a doctor in a white coat was smoking a cigarette and walking about like a man expecting something. Sometimes he rubbed his very delicate hands together. Two other people were talking under their breath, near a table with a body stretched out on it under a white sheet.

  The inspector tried to slow his companion down, but he had no time to get there first. She was already in the yard, where she stopped in front of the table, held her breath and suddenly raised the sheet over the dead man’s face.

  She did not cry out. The two men who were talking had turned to her in surprise. The doctor put on rubber gloves, went over to a door and asked, ‘Isn’t Mademoiselle Angèle back yet?’

  While he took off one of his gloves to light another cigarette Madame Gallet stood there motionless, very stiff, and Maigret prepared to go to her aid.

  She abruptly turned to him, her face full of hatred, and cried, ‘How could this happen? Who dared to …?’

  ‘Come this way, madame … it is him, isn’t it?’

  Her eyes moving fast now, she looked at the two men, the doctor in white, the nurse who was on her way, waddling.

  ‘What do we do now?’ she managed to say, her voice hoarse.

  And when Maigret, embarrassed, hesitated to reply, she finally flung herself on her husband’s body, cast a furious glance of anger and defiance at the yard and everyone in it and shouted, ‘I don’t want to! I don’t want to!’

  She had to be forcibly removed and handed over to the concierge, who abandoned her buckets of water. When Maigret returned to the yard the doctor had a surgical knife in his hand and a mask over his face, and the nurse was handing him a frosted glass bottle.

  Unintentionally, the inspector kicked a small black silk hat, decorated with a mauve bow and an imitation diamond gemstone.

  • • •

  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.

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nbsp; ‘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.

  2. A Young Man in Glasses

  There were only two or three groups of hotel guests still sitting at their tables. Howls of indignation from children being made to go to bed came from the rooms on the first floor.

  From the other side of an open window, a woman’s voice asked, ‘See that big man, did you? He’s a policeman! He’ll put you in prison if you’re naughty …’

  Still eating, and letting his eyes wander over the scene before him, Maigret heard a persistent droning sound. It was Inspector Grenier from Nevers, talking for the sheer pleasure of talking.

  ‘Now if only he’d had something stolen from him. Then the case would be child’s play. This is Monday … the crime was committed on the night of Saturday into Sunday … it was a holiday. These days, as well as the travelling showmen, and I distrust them on principle, you see all sorts of people prowling round. You don’t know what the countryside’s like, inspector! You may well be able to find nastier characters here than among the dregs of Paris …’

  ‘The fact is,’ said Maigret, interrupting him, ‘if it hadn’t been for the holiday the crime would have been discovered at once.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean it was because of the rifle range on the fairground and the firecrackers going off that no one heard the gunshot. Didn’t you tell me that Gallet didn’t die of the injury to his head?’

  ‘So the doctor says, and the post-mortem will confirm that hypothesis. The man got a bullet in his head, but it seems that he could have lived another two or three hours. Directly after the shot, however, he was stabbed in the heart with a knife, and death was instantaneous. The knife has been found.’

  ‘How about the revolver?’

  ‘We haven’t found that.’

  ‘The knife was in the room with him?’

  ‘Within a few centimetres of the body, and there are bruises on Gallet’s left wrist. It looks as if, knowing he was wounded, he raised the knife in the air as he made for his attacker, but he was weakened … Then the murderer grabbed his wrist, twisted it, and ran the blade through his heart. That’s not just my own opinion, the doctor thinks so too.’

  ‘So if it hadn’t been for the fair, Gallet wouldn’t be dead!’

  Maigret was not trying to indulge in ingenious deductions or startle his provincial colleague, but the idea struck him and now he was thinking it through, curious to see where it would lead him.

  But for all the noise of the wooden carousel horses, the rifle range and the firecrackers, the detonation would have been heard. People from the hotel would have come running, and might have intervened before the knife went into the victim.

  Night had fallen now; all you could see were a few reflections of moonlight on the river and the two lamps at the ends of the bridge. Inside the café, guests were playing billiards.

  ‘A strange story,’ concluded Inspector Grenier. ‘It’s not eleven yet, is it? My train leaves at eleven thirty-two, and it will take me quarter of an hour to get to the station. I was saying that if anything had gone missing …’

  ‘What time do the fairground stalls close?’

  ‘Midnight. That’s the law!’

  ‘Which means that the crime was committed before midnight, and that in turn means that not everyone in the hotel will have been in bed.’

  While both officers pursued their own trains of thought, the conversation went on in desultory fashion.

  ‘Like that false name he gave, Monsieur Clément. The proprietor should have told you … he stayed here from time to time. About every six months, I’d say. It must be ten years ago that he first came here. He always used the name of Clément, a man of private means, from Orleans.’

  ‘Did he have a case with him – the kind of thing commercial travellers use for their samples?’

  ‘I didn’t see anything like that in his room … but the hotel proprietor can tell you. Monsieur Tardivon! Come here a minute, would you? This is Inspector Maigret from Paris, and he’d like to ask you a question. Did Monsieur Clément usually have a commercial traveller’s case with him?’

  ‘Containing silverware,’ Inspector Maigret added.

  ‘Oh no. He always had a travelling bag for his personal things, because he was very careful about looking after himself. Wait a minute! I didn’t see him much in an ordinary jacket. Most of the time he wore a waisted one with tails, either black or dark grey.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Maigret thought about the firm of Niel et Cie, which Monsieur Gallet represented all over Normandy. It specialized in gold and silverware for gifts: rattles, reproduction mugs, silver place settings, fruit baskets, sets of knives, cake slices …

  He ate the tiny piece of almond cake that a waitress had put in front of him and filled his pipe.

  ‘A little glass of something?’ asked Monsieur Tardivon.

  ‘I don’t mind if I do.’

  Monsieur Tardivon went in search of the bottle himself and then sat down at the table with the two police officers.

  ‘So you’ll be in charge of the inquiries, inspector? What a thing, eh? Right at the beginning of the season, too! What would you say if I told you seven guests left this hotel this morning to go to the Commercial Hotel instead! Your very good health, gentlemen! Now, as for this Monsieur Clément … I’m used to calling him that, you see … and who could have known it wasn’t his real name?’

  More and more people were leaving the terrace. A waiter was taking the bay trees in wooden containers that stood among the tables and lining them up against the wall. A goods train passed along the opposite bank, and the eyes of the three men automatically followed the reddish light as it moved along the foot of the hill.

  Monsieur Tardivon had begun his career as a cook in a big house and still had a certain air of solemnity from those days, a very slightly contrived way of bowing towards the person he was talking to.

  ‘The really extraordinary thing,’ he said, cradling his glass of Armagnac in the palm of his hand, ‘is that the crime was within a hair’s breadth of not being committed at all …’

  ‘Yes, the funfair,’ Grenier quickly put in, glancing at Maigret.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean … no, when Monsieur Clément arrived on Saturday morning I gave him the blue room, the one that looks out on what we call the nettle lane. It’s the lane over there on the left. We call it that because now it’s not used for anything it’s been invaded by nettles …’

  ‘Why isn’t it used for anything?’ asked Maigret.

  ‘See that wall just beyond the lane? It’s the wall of M
onsieur de Saint-Hilaire’s villa. Well, here in the country we usually call it the little chateau, to distinguish it from the big one, the old chateau of Sancerre above the hill. You can see its turrets from here, and it has very fine grounds. Well, in the old days, before the Hôtel de la Loire was built, the grounds came up to here, and the grand front entrance with a wrought-iron gate was at the end of the nettle lane. The gate is still there, but no one uses it, because they’ve made another entrance on the riverbank 500 metres away … In short, I gave Monsieur Clément the blue room with windows looking out this way. It’s quiet, no one ever goes along the lane because it doesn’t lead anywhere. I don’t know why, but the afternoon when he came back he asked if I didn’t have a room with a view of the yard. But I didn’t have another vacancy. There’s a big choice in the winter because I get hardly anyone then but the regulars, commercial travellers going round at fixed times, but the summer … that’s different! Believe it or not, most of my guests come from Paris! There’s nothing like the air of the Loire … Well, so I told Monsieur Clément that I couldn’t oblige him, and I did point out that his room was the best in the hotel. With a view of the yard you get chickens and geese, and water being drawn from the well at all sorts of times. And no matter how much grease we put on it, that chain makes a screeching noise. He didn’t persist … but if only I had had a room with a view of the yard, just think … he wouldn’t be dead now!’

  ‘Why not?’ murmured Maigret.

  ‘Didn’t anyone tell you that the shot was fired from at least six metres away? And the room is only five metres wide, so the murderer must have been outside, taking advantage of the fact that the nettle lane is deserted. He couldn’t have got into the yard to fire his gun, and besides, people would have heard it. Another little drink, gentlemen? It’s on the house, of course.’

  ‘So that makes two!’ said the inspector.

  ‘Two what?’ asked Grenier.

  ‘Two coincidences. First the fair had to be in full swing, to muffle the sound of the shot. And then all the rooms looking out on the yard had to be occupied …’ He turned to Monsieur Tardivon, who had just refilled their glasses. ‘How many guests do you have here at the moment?’