The Late Monsieur Gallet Read online

  ‘Have you decided the figure at which you’ll stop?’

  ‘Five hundred thousand … we expect to work in Paris for three more years.’

  Maigret was now looking at her with feelings verging on admiration. But a particular kind of admiration, with more than a touch of revulsion in it. She was thirty! Henry was twenty-five! They were in love, or at least they had decided to spend their lives together. Yet their relationship was like that of two partners in a business enterprise! She spoke of it simply, even with a certain pride.

  ‘Have you been in Sancerre for long?’

  ‘I arrived on 20 June to stay for a month.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go to stay at the Hôtel de la Loire, or the Commercial?’

  ‘Too expensive for me! I’m paying only twenty-two francs a day at the Pension Germain, at the far end of the village.’

  ‘So Henry came on the 25th? What time?’

  ‘He has only Saturday and Sunday off, and it had been agreed that he’d spend the Sunday at Saint-Fargeau. He came here on Saturday morning, and left by the last train that evening.’

  ‘And that was when?’

  ‘Eleven thirty-two p.m. I went to the station with him.’

  ‘Did you know that his father was here?’

  ‘Henry told me he’d met him. He was furious, because he was sure his father had come here just to spy on us, and Henry didn’t want his family getting involved in what’s no one’s business but our own.’

  ‘Did the Gallets know about that 100,000 francs?’

  ‘Of course! Henry has come of age – he had a right to live his own life, didn’t he?’

  ‘In what terms did your lover usually speak of his father?’

  ‘He thought poorly of him for his lack of ambition. He said it wasn’t right, at his age, for him still to be selling junk jewellery. But he was always very respectful to his parents, especially his mother.’

  ‘So he didn’t know that in reality Émile Gallet was nothing but a crook?’

  ‘A crook? Him …?’

  ‘And that for the last eighteen years he hadn’t been selling “junk jewellery” at all?’

  ‘That can’t be true!’

  Was she playing a part as she looked at the lugubrious dummy corpse on the floor with a kind of wonderment?

  ‘I’m stunned, inspector! Him! With his odd ways, his ridiculous clothes? He looked just like a poor pensioner!’

  ‘What did you two do on Saturday afternoon?’

  ‘We went for a walk in the hills, Henry and I. It was when he left me to go back to the Commercial that he met his father. Then we met again at eight and we went for another walk, on the other side of the water this time, until it was time for Henry to catch the train.’

  ‘And you didn’t come close to this hotel?’

  ‘It was better to avoid a meeting.’

  ‘Then you came back from the station by yourself. You crossed the bridge …’

  ‘And I turned left at once to get back to the Pension Germain. I don’t like walking on my own at night.’

  ‘Do you know Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire?’

  ‘Who’s he? I’ve never heard the name … Inspector, I hope you don’t suspect Henry of anything.’ Her expression was animated, but she was as composed as ever. ‘I’m here because I know him. He’s almost always been ill, and that’s made him gloomy and distrustful. We can sometimes spend hours together without talking. It’s pure coincidence that he met his father here. Although I realize it might seem an odd coincidence. He’s too proud to defend himself … I don’t know what he told you. Did he answer your questions at all? What I can swear is that he never left me from eight in the evening to the time when he caught his train. He was nervous. He was afraid his mother would hear about our relationship, because he’s always been very fond of her, and he foresaw that she’d try to turn him against me … I’m not a young girl any more! There are five years between us. And, after all, I’ve been his mistress. I can’t wait to hear that the murderer is behind bars, especially for Henry’s sake. He’s clever enough to know that his meeting with his father could give rise to terrible suspicions.’

  Maigret went on looking at her with the same surprise. He was wondering why this behaviour, which after all did her some credit, did not move him. Even as she uttered those last phrases with a certain vehemence, Éléonore Boursang was still in control of herself. He moved the papers to show a large photo from Criminal Records of the corpse as it had been found, and the young woman’s eyes moved over the disturbing image without lingering on it.

  ‘Have you found out anything yet?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you know a Monsieur Jacob?’

  She raised her eyes to him as if inviting him to see the sincerity in them. ‘No, I don’t know the name. Who is he? The murderer?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, as he went towards the door.

  Éléonore Boursang left in much the same way as she had come into the room. ‘May I come to see you now and then, inspector, to ask if you have any news?’

  ‘Whenever you like.’

  The sergeant was waiting patiently in the corridor. When the visitor had disappeared, he cast an inquiring glance at the inspector.

  ‘What did you find out at the station?’ Maigret asked.

  ‘The young man took the Paris train at eleven thirty-two with a third-class return ticket.’

  ‘And the crime was committed between eleven and half past twelve,’ murmured the inspector thoughtfully. ‘If you hurried you could get from here to Tracy-Sancerre in ten minutes. The murderer could have done the deed between eleven and eleven twenty. If it takes ten minutes to reach the station, then you wouldn’t need any longer to get back … so Gallet could have been killed between eleven forty-five and half past twelve by someone coming back from the station … Except there’s that business of the barred gate! And what the devil was Émile Gallet doing on the wall?’

  The sergeant was sitting in the same place as before, nodding his approval and waiting to hear what followed. But nothing followed.

  ‘Come on, let’s go and have an aperitif!’ said Maigret.

  6. The Meeting on the Wall

  ‘Still nothing?’

  ‘… bution!’

  ‘What word did you say just now?’

  ‘Preparations. At least, I suppose so. The ions bit is missing. Or it could be preparation, singular. Or preparatory.’

  Maigret sighed, shrugged his shoulders and left the cool room, where a tall, thin, red-haired young man with a tired face and the phlegmatic manner typical of northerners had been bending over a table since that morning, devoting himself to work that would have discouraged even a monk. His name was Joseph Moers, and his accent showed that he was of Flemish origin. He worked in the labs of Criminal Records and had come to Sancerre at Maigret’s request, to set up shop in the dead man’s hotel room, where he had arranged his instruments, including a strange kind of spirit stove.

  He had hardly looked up since seven in the morning, except when the inspector entered the room abruptly or stood at the window looking out on the nettle lane.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘I … you …’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’ve just found an I and a you, except that the u is missing too.’

  He had spread out some very thin sheets of glass on the table, and as he went along with his work was coating them with liquid glue heated on the spirit stove. From time to time he went over to the fireplace, delicately picked up one of the pieces of burned paper and put it on one of the sheets of glass. The ash was fragile and brittle, ready to crumble to bits. Sometimes it took five minutes to soften it by surrounding it with water vapour, and then it was stuck on the glass.

  Opposite him, Joseph Moers had a small case which was a veritable portab
le laboratory. The larger pieces of charred paper measured seven to eight centimetres. The smaller pieces were mere dust.

  … bution … prepara … I … yo

  That was the result of two hours of work, but, unlike Maigret, Moers was not impatient and did not flinch at the thought that he had examined only about one-hundredth of a part of the contents of the fireplace. A large purple fly was buzzing as it circled round his head. It settled on his frowning brow three times, and he didn’t even raise a hand to brush it away. Perhaps he didn’t even notice it.

  However, he did tell Maigret, ‘The trouble is that when you come in through the doorway you set up a draught! You’ve already lost me some ash like that.’

  ‘Oh, all right! I’ll come in through the window!’

  It was not a joke. He did it. The files were still in this room, which Maigret had chosen as a study, and where the clothes spread on the floor with a knife piercing them had not even been touched. The inspector was impatient to know the result of the expertise he had summoned to his aid, and as he waited he could hardly keep still.

  For quarter of an hour, he could be seen walking up and down the lane with his head bent, hands clasped behind his back. Then he straddled the window-sill, his skin burning in the sunlight and shiny; he mopped his brow and growled, ‘Slow work, if you ask me!’

  Did Moers even hear him? His movements were as precise as a manicurist’s, and his mind was entirely on the sheets of glass that he was covering with irregularly outlined black marks.

  The main reason why Maigret was agitated was that he had nothing to do, or rather he thought it was better not to try doing anything before he had a clear idea of what was on the paper burned on the night of the crime. And as he paced up and down the lane, where the oak leaves cast dappled light and shade on him, he kept going over the same ideas.

  Henry and Éléonore Boursang could have killed Gallet before going to the station, he thought. Éléonore could have come back on her own to kill him after seeing her lover off on the train … and then there’s that wall, and that key! What’s more, there was a certain Monsieur Jacob, the man whose letters Gallet was fearfully hiding …

  He went back ten times to examine the lock of the barred gate, without finding anything new. Then, as he was passing the spot where Émile Gallet had climbed the wall, he suddenly went into action himself, took off his jacket and put the toe of his right shoe into the first join between the stones. He weighed a good hundred kilos, but he had no difficulty in grasping the hanging branches, and once he had a hold on them it was child’s play to finish the climb.

  The wall was made of irregular stones covered with a coat of whitewash. On top of it was a row of bricks set edgeways. Moss had invaded them, and there was even grass growing and flourishing.

  From his perch, Maigret had an excellent view of Moers deciphering something through his magnifying glass.

  ‘Anything new?’ he called.

  ‘An s and a comma.’

  Above his head the inspector now had not oak leaves, but the foliage of an enormous beech tree, its trunk coming up from the property on the other side of the wall.

  He knelt down, because the top of the wall was not wide, and he was not sure of keeping his balance on his feet, examined the moss to right and left of him and murmured, ‘Well, well!’

  Not that his discovery was sensational. It consisted solely of the fact that the moss had been scuffed and even partly removed at a spot directly above the scratches on the stone, but nowhere else.

  As the moss was fragile, as he quickly established, he felt absolutely certain that Émile Gallet had not walked along the wall, not even as much as a metre either way.

  So now to find out if he came down on the side of the Saint-Hilaire property …

  Strictly speaking, this place was not really part of the grounds, no doubt because the area was hidden behind a great many trees and served as a kind of outdoor lumber room. A dozen metres from Maigret, there were piles of old barrels, empty, stove in or minus their hoops. There were also old bottles, several of which had held pharmaceuticals, crates, a decrepit mower, rusty tools and packages of old numbers of a comic magazine tied up with string. Soaked with rain, dried and discoloured by the sun, stained by the soil, they were a sad sight.

  Before climbing down from the wall, Maigret made sure that just below him, in fact just below the place that Gallet must have occupied on the wall himself, there were no markings on the ground. He jumped so as not to risk scratching the wall and was rewarded by landing on all fours.

  There was nothing to be seen of Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire’s villa apart from a few light-coloured patches in the filigree pattern of the foliage. An engine was chugging, and Maigret now knew that it was pumping water from the well into stocks for the household.

  This corner of the park was full of flies because of all the rubbish. The inspector had to keep shooing them away, and did so in an increasingly bad temper.

  First for the wall, he thought.

  The examination of the wall was easy. It had been given a coat of whitewash on both sides in spring. Maigret could see that there was no trace of any mark or scratch underneath the place where Émile Gallet had climbed the wall, and no footprints for ten metres anywhere near.

  However, near the casks and bottles the inspector noticed that a barrel had been dragged two or three metres and then stood on end at the foot of the wall. It was still there. He got up on it, and his head came above the top of the wall exactly ten and a half metres from the place where Gallet had been stationed. Furthermore, from where he was he saw Moers still at work, not even taking time off to mop his face.

  ‘Found anything?’

  ‘Clignancourt … but I think I have a better fragment here.’

  The moss on the wall above the barrel had not been torn away, but looked as if it had been crushed by arms pressing on it. Maigret tried leaning on his elbows and got the identical result a little further along.

  In other words, he reflected, Émile Gallet gets up on the wall but does not come down on the side of Saint-Hilaire’s property. On the other hand, someone coming from inside the Saint-Hilaire property hauls himself up on that barrel but goes no higher and does not leave the enclosure of the grounds, or at least not that way.

  For that to make any sense, the couple going for a nocturnal expedition would have had to be a young man and a girl. And whichever of them had stayed inside the wall could have brought the barrel as close to the other as possible.

  But this couldn’t have been a lovers’ meeting! One of the couple must certainly have been Monsieur Gallet, who had taken off his jacket before embarking on an exercise which was far from compatible with his character.

  Was the other one Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire?

  The two men had seen each other first that morning, then in the afternoon, quite openly. It was not very likely that they had decided on such a roundabout way of seeing each other again after dark!

  And at a distance of ten metres from one another they wouldn’t even have been able to hear each other if they spoke in an undertone.

  Unless, thought Maigret, they had come separately, first one and then the other … but which of the two had hoisted himself up on the wall first? And had the two men met?

  It was about seven metres from the barrel to Gallet’s room – the distance at which the gun had been fired.

  When Maigret turned round he saw the gardener, who was looking at him with an interested expression.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ said the inspector. ‘Is your master here?’

  ‘Gone fishing.’

  ‘You know I’m from the police, don’t you? Well, I’d like to get out of these grounds without jumping the wall. Would you open the gate at the end of the nettle lane for me?’

  ‘No problem!’ said the man, making off in t
hat direction.

  ‘Do you have the key?’

  ‘No, you’ll see!’ And when he reached the gate he put his hand unhesitatingly into the gap between two stones and cried out in surprise.

  ‘Good heavens!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It isn’t there any more! And I put it back myself last year, that’s when three oak trees were chopped down and we got them out this way.’

  ‘Did your master know?’

  ‘Course he did!’

  ‘You don’t remember seeing him go that way?’

  ‘Not since last year.’

  Another version of the facts automatically began taking shape in the inspector’s mind: Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire up on top of the barrel, firing the gun at Gallet, going round by way of the gate, leaping into his victim’s room …

  But it was so improbable! Even supposing that the rusty lock hadn’t put up any resistance, it would take three minutes to get along the lane separating the two points. And in those three minutes Émile Gallet, with half his face blown away, had not cried out, had not fallen over, had done nothing but take his knife out of his pocket in case someone came along to attack him! It all sounded wrong! It creaked the way the gate ought to have creaked. Yet it was the only theory that made sense in terms of logical deduction from the material clues!

  Anyway, thought Maigret, there was a man on the other side of the wall. That was a definite fact. But nothing indicated that the man was Saint-Hilaire other than the lost key and the fact that the unknown stranger was in his property.

  On the other hand, two more people closely connected with Émile Gallet, a couple who might have an interest in his death, were in Sancerre at that moment, and there was no firm alibi to show that they had not set foot in the nettle lane. That couple was Henry Gallet and Éléonore.

  Maigret crushed a horsefly that had settled on his cheek and saw Moers leaning out of the window.

  ‘Inspector!’

  ‘Anything new?’

  But the Fleming had disappeared into the room again.