The Late Monsieur Gallet Page 3

  ‘Thirty-four, counting the children.’

  ‘And none of them have left since the crime was committed?’

  ‘Yes, I told you. Seven have left: a family from the suburbs of Paris – Saint-Denis, I think. A mechanic of some kind, with his wife, his mother-in-law, his sister-in-law and their kids. Not very well-educated people, incidentally. I can’t say I was sorry to see them move to the Commercial. We all have our own kinds of regulars, and here, as everyone will agree, you meet only a nice class of guests …’

  ‘How did Monsieur Clément spend his days?’

  ‘I couldn’t really say … he went for walks. Wait a moment, I had an idea that he has a child somewhere around here … a child out of wedlock. That’s just an idea, because in spite of yourself you try to work things out. He was very polite, and there was always a sad look about him. I never saw him eating at the table d’hôte – we do have a table d’hôte in winter, but he liked to sit in a corner dining by himself …’

  Maigret had taken a notebook out of his pocket, an ordinary notebook with a black waxed cover, the kind a laundrywoman would use. He made some notes in pencil.

  Send telegram to Rouen;

  Send telegram to Niel et Cie;

  Look at hotel yard;

  Find out about Saint-Hilaire property;

  Take fingerprints from knife;

  Get list of guests;

  Mechanic and family at Commercial Hotel;

  People who left Sancerre on Sunday the 26th;

  Get the town crier to announce a reward for anyone who met Monsieur Gallet on Saturday the 25th.

  His colleague from Nevers, a forced smile on his lips, was following Maigret’s every movement with his eyes.

  ‘Well? Have you come up with an idea already?’

  ‘No, nothing of the sort! I have two telegrams to send now, and then I’m going to bed.’

  The only people left in the café were the locals finishing their game of billiards. Maigret glanced at the nettle lane, which had once been the central avenue going up to the little chateau and still had two rows of fine oak trees lining it. These days dense vegetation had invaded everything, and there was nothing to be seen at this hour.

  Grenier prepared to set off for the station, and Maigret retraced his steps to shake hands and say goodbye.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Grenier. ‘Between ourselves, this is a brute of a case, don’t you agree? Nothing sensational, and no kind of useful lead either. Sooner you than me, to be frank with you.’

  Maigret was shown to a room on the first floor, where mosquitoes began to whine around his head. He was in a bad temper. The job ahead was a gloomy prospect, a nondescript case with nothing interesting about it.

  And yet once he was in bed, instead of going to sleep he began seeing Gallet’s face in his mind’s eye, sometimes only one cheek, sometimes only the lower part of the face.

  He tossed and turned awkwardly in the damp sheets. He could hear the murmuring of the river as it lapped against the sandbanks.

  Every criminal case has a feature of its own, one that you identify sooner or later, and it often provides the key to the mystery.

  He thought that the feature of this one was, surely, its sheer mediocrity.

  Mediocrity in Saint-Fargeau! A mediocre house! Undistinguished interior decoration, with the portrait photo of the boy about to take his First Communion and the one of his father in an overly tight jacket, both on the piano.

  More mediocrity in Sancerre! A low-budget holiday resort! A second-class hotel!

  All these details added to the dull, grey atmosphere surrounding the case.

  A commercial traveller for the firm of Niel: fake silverware, fake luxury, fake style!

  A funfair, and one with a rifle range and firecrackers into the bargain …

  And then there was the distinction lent to it all by Madame Gallet, whose hat adorned with paste diamonds had fallen into the dust of the school playground.

  It was a relief to Maigret to find out, in the morning, that the widow had taken the first train back to Saint-Fargeau, and the coffin containing the remains of Émile Gallet was on its way back to Les Marguerites in a hired van.

  He was in a hurry to get this case over and done with. Everyone else had left: the magistrate, the doctor with his seven guests coming to dinner, and Inspector Grenier.

  As a result, Maigret was left alone with some precise tasks to carry out.

  First, he must wait for replies to the two telegrams he had sent the previous evening.

  Then examine the room where the crime had been committed. Finally, think about all those who could have committed the crime and who were therefore suspects.

  He did not have to wait long for the reply from Rouen. It came from the police of that city:

  Have questioned staff of Hôtel de la Poste. Cashier, Irma Strauss, said a man called Émile Gallet sent her an envelope containing postcards to be forwarded. Received 100 francs a month for her trouble. Has been doing this for five years, and thinks that the cashier before her did the same.

  Half an hour later, at ten o’clock, a telegram from the firm of Niel arrived:

  Émile Gallet has not worked for our firm since 1912.

  This was the moment when the town crier began doing his rounds. Maigret, who had just finished breakfast, was examining the hotel yard (which had nothing in particular about it) when he was told that the road-mender would like a word with him.

  ‘I was on the road to Saint-Thibaut,’ he explained, ‘when I saw that Monsieur Clément. I knew him, see, because I’d met him a few times, and I knew his jacket. There was a young man just coming down the road from the farm, and they met face to face. I was sort of like a hundred metres from them, but I could see they were arguing …’

  ‘And did they walk away from each other at once?’

  ‘Oh no, they like went up the hill at the end of the road. Then the old man came back on his own, and it wasn’t ’til half an hour later in the square that I saw the young man again at the Commercial.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Tall, thin … with a long face and glasses.’

  ‘What was he wearing?’

  ‘Couldn’t rightly say. Might’ve been something grey … or black. So do I get the fifty francs?’

  Maigret gave him the money and set off for the Commercial Hotel, where he had drunk his aperitif the evening before.

  Yes, he was told, the young man had had lunch there on Saturday 25 June, but the waiter who served him was now on holiday at Pouilly, some twenty kilometres away.

  ‘Are you sure he didn’t spend the night here?’

  ‘He’d be in our register if he had.’

  ‘And no one remembers him?’

  The cashier recollected that someone had asked for pasta without any butter, and she added that it had to be cooked specially for him.

  ‘It was a young man sitting over there, to the left of that pillar. He had an unhealthy complexion.’

  It was beginning to get hot, and Maigret no longer felt the same bored indifference as he had early in the morning.

  ‘Did he have a long face? Thin lips?’

  ‘Yes, a kind of a wide mouth with a scornful look to it. He didn’t want coffee or a liqueur or anything … some guests are like that, you know …’

  What had made Maigret think of the photograph of the lad dressed for his First Communion?

  The inspector was forty-five years old. He had spent half his life in various branches of the police force: Vice Squad, Traffic, Drug Squad, Railway Police, Gambling Squad. It was quite enough to dispel any vaguely mystical ideas and kill faith in intuition stone dead.

  But all the same, for almost twenty-four hours he had been haunted by those two portrait photographs, father and
son, and also by an ordinary little phrase from Madame Gallet: ‘He was on a diet …’

  It was without any very clear idea in his mind that he made for the post office and a telephone, and asked for the town hall of Saint-Fargeau.

  ‘Hello. Police Judiciaire … can you tell me when Monsieur Gallet’s funeral is taking place?’

  ‘At eight o’clock tomorrow.’

  ‘In Saint-Fargeau?’

  ‘Here, yes.’

  ‘One more question! Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘The Saint-Fargeau schoolteacher.’

  ‘Do you know Monsieur Gallet junior?’

  ‘Well, I’ve seen him several times. He came for the papers this morning.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Is he tall, thin?’

  ‘Yes … yes, rather.’

  ‘Does he wear glasses?’

  ‘Wait a minute. Yes, now I remember. Horn-rimmed glasses.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know if he’s unwell?’

  ‘How would I know? He’s pale, certainly.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  Ten minutes later, the inspector was back at the Commercial.

  ‘Madame, can you tell me whether your guest at lunch on Saturday wore glasses?’

  The cashier searched her memory and finally shook her head. ‘Yes … well, no, I can’t remember. We get so much passing trade in the summer! It was his mouth I noticed most. In fact, I even said to the waiter, that man has a mouth like a toad’s …’

  It took Maigret longer to track the road-mender down, because he was busy drinking his fifty francs away with some friends in a little bistro tucked away behind the church.

  ‘You told me that the man you saw wore glasses.’

  ‘The young one, that’s right. Not the old one.’

  ‘What sort of glasses?’

  ‘Well, round, know what I mean? With dark rims …’

  On getting up that morning, Maigret had been glad to hear that the body had been taken away. And Madame Gallet, the magistrate, the doctor and the local police officers had also left. He hoped that now he could focus on an objective problem at last, and put the strange appearance of the old man with the beard out of his mind.

  He took the train for Saint-Fargeau at three in the afternoon.

  For a start all he had seen of Émile Gallet was a photograph. Then he had seen half his face.

  Now all he would find would be a coffin permanently closed. And yet, as the train moved away, he had the disagreeable feeling that he was running after the dead man.

  Back in Sancerre a disappointed Monsieur Tardivon told his regulars as he offered them a glass of Armagnac:

  ‘A man who looked the serious kind … a man of our own age! And he heads off without even going into the room! Do you want to see the place where he died? Funny thing, that. However, the Nevers police are no better … when they took the body away they drew its outline on the floor first, in chalk. Mind you don’t touch anything … huh! You never know where a thing like this will lead you.’

  3. Henry Gallet’s Replies

  Maigret, who had spent the night at home in the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, arrived in Saint-Fargeau on the Wednesday a little before eight in the morning. He was already out of the station when he had second thoughts, retraced his steps and asked the clerk in the ticket office, ‘Did Monsieur Gallet often travel by train?’

  ‘Father or son?’

  ‘The father.’

  ‘He went away for three weeks every month. He travelled second class to Rouen.’

  ‘What about the son?’

  ‘He arrives from Paris almost every Saturday evening on a third-class return ticket, and goes back by the last train on Sunday … Who could ever have foreseen that …! I can still see him opening the fishing season …’

  ‘Father or son?’

  ‘The father, for heaven’s sake! By the way, the blue skiff you can see among the trees is his. Everyone’s going to want to buy that skiff. He made it himself out of best oak, thinking up all sorts of little improvements. It was like the gadgets he made …’

  Conscientiously, Maigret added this little detail to the still very sketchy idea he had of the dead man. He looked at the skiff, the Seine, tried to imagine the man with the goatee beard sitting perfectly still for hours with a bamboo fishing rod in his hand.

  Then he set off for Les Marguerites, noticing that an empty, fairly well-appointed hearse was travelling the same way. There was no one to be seen near the house, except for a man pushing a wheelbarrow, who stopped at the sight of the hearse, no doubt interested to see the funeral procession.

  The bell on the gate had been wrapped in a linen cloth, and the front door was draped in black, with the dead man’s initials picked out in silver embroidery.

  Maigret had not expected so much pomp and ceremony. To the left, in the corridor, there was a tray with a single card on it, one corner turned down, from the Mayor of Saint-Fargeau.

  The sitting room where Madame Gallet had received the inspector had been turned into a temporary chapel of rest. Its furniture must have been moved into the dining room. Black hangings covered the walls, and the coffin stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by candles.

  It was hard to say why the scene seemed so odd. Perhaps because there were no visitors, and you could guess that there would not be any, although the hearse was already at the door.

  That lone visiting card, a fake lithograph! All those silver tears! And two silhouettes, one on each side of the coffin: Madame Gallet on the right in full mourning, a crape veil over her face, a rosary of matt beads in her fingers; Henry Gallet on the left, also entirely in funereal black.

  Maigret moved forward in silence, dipped a sprig of box into the holy water and sprinkled the water over the coffin. He felt that mother and son were following him with their eyes, but no one said a word. Then he moved back into a corner, on the alert for sounds from outside and at the same time watching the young man’s facial expressions. Sometimes one of the horses drawing the hearse pawed the path with a hoof. The undertakers’ men were talking under their breath out in the sunlight, close to the window. In the funereal room, lit only by the candles, young Monsieur Gallet’s irregular face looked even more irregular because all the black emphasized the unhealthy pallor of his skin. His hair, separated by a parting, clung close to his scalp. He had a high, bumpy forehead. It was difficult to catch his troubled gaze as he peered short-sightedly through the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses.

  Sometimes Madame Gallet dabbed her eyes with her mourning handkerchief. Henry’s gaze never focused on anything for long. It slid over things, always avoiding the inspector, who was relieved to hear the steps of the undertaker’s men.

  A little later, the stretcher bumped into the corridor walls as it was carried in. Madame Gallet uttered a small sob, and her son patted her on the shoulder while still looking elsewhere.

  There was a great contrast between the ostentatious splendour of the hearse and the two figures who began to walk after it, preceded by a puzzled master of ceremonies.

  It was still as hot as ever. The man with the wheelbarrow made the sign of the cross, and went off along another path, while the funeral procession, taking small steps, went down the avenue, which was wide enough for regiments to march down it.

  • • •

  A small group of locals gathered in the square as the religious ceremony took place, but Maigret went off into the town hall, where he found no one. He had to go and fetch the schoolteacher, whose classroom was next to the town hall, and the children were left to their own devices for a little while.

  ‘All I can tell you,’ said the teacher, ‘is what’s recorded in our registers. Wait, here we are:


  ‘Gallet, Émile Yves Pierre, born Nantes, 1879, married Aurore Préjean in Paris, October 1902 … A son, Henry, born in Paris 1906, registered at the town hall of the IXth arrondissement …’

  ‘Don’t the local people like them?’

  ‘It’s just that the Gallets, who had the villa built in 1910 when the forest was sold off in plots, never wanted to see anyone … they’re very proud. I’ve been known to spend a whole Sunday fishing in my skiff less than ten metres away from Gallet’s. If I needed something he’d let me have it, but I wouldn’t get the slightest bit of conversation out of him afterwards …’

  ‘How much do you think this lifestyle cost?’

  ‘I can’t say exactly, because I don’t know what he spent when he was away, but they’ll have needed at least 2,000 francs a month just for the upkeep of their household. If you’ve seen the villa, you’ll know that it has every convenience. They send to Corbeil or Melun for almost everything they need … and that’s another thing that …’

  But looking out of the window, Maigret saw the funeral procession going round the church and into the graveyard. He thanked the teacher and, once out in the road again, heard the first spadeful of earth falling on the coffin.

  He did not let the mourners see him but went a long way round back to the villa and was careful to arrive a little while after the Gallets. The maid opened the door to him and looked at him hesitantly.

  ‘Madame can’t …’ she began.

  ‘Tell Monsieur Henry that I need to talk to him.’

  The squinting maidservant left him outside. A few moments later, the figure of the young man appeared in the corridor. He came towards the doorway and asked, looking past Maigret, ‘Couldn’t you postpone this visit to another day? My mother is absolutely devastated.’

  ‘I have to talk to you today. Please forgive me if I insist.’

  Henry half turned, thus implying that the police officer had only to follow him. He hesitated at the doors on the ground floor and finally opened the door to the dining room, where the sitting-room furniture had been stacked so that you could hardly get round it. Maigret saw the portrait photo of Henry as a boy ready for his First Communion, but looked in vain for the photo of Émile Gallet. Henry did not sit down or say anything, but he took off his glasses to clean the lenses with a gesture of annoyance, while his eyelashes fluttered as he adjusted to the bright light.