The Late Monsieur Gallet (10 page)

… 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 that 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.

Before deciding to go the long way round by the bank again, Maigret shook the gate, and contrary to his expectations it gave way.

‘Hey, it's not locked after all!' said the gardener in surprise, leaning over the lock. ‘Funny thing, that!'

Maigret almost recommended him not to mention his visit to Saint-Hilaire, but looking the man up and down he thought him too stupid to heed it and decided not to make matters more complicated.

‘Why did you call me just now?' he asked Moers a little later.

Moers had lit a candle and was looking through the sheet of glass almost entirely covered with black. ‘Do you know a Monsieur Jacob?' he asked, putting his head back to examine his work as a whole with satisfaction.

‘Good heavens! What have you found?'

‘Nothing much. One of the burned letters was signed Monsieur Jacob.'

‘Is that all?'

‘Just about. The letter was written on squared paper torn out of a notebook or some kind of register. I've only found a few words on that kind of paper.
Absolutely
, or I suppose so because the
ab
is missing. Then
Monday …
'

Maigret waited for more, frowning, teeth clenched on his pipe.

‘After that?'

‘There's the word
prison
underlined twice. Unless something's lost and the word is
prisoner
. Then there's
cash
, or it could be
cashier.
And there's also a number written in words,
twenty thousand …
'

‘No address?'

‘I told you just now,
Clignancourt
. The trouble is that there's no way I can reconstruct the order of the words.'

‘Any clue in the handwriting?'

‘There isn't any – it was done on a typewriter.'

Monsieur Tardivon was in the habit of serving Maigret's meals himself, and he did so making a great show of discretion together with a touch of conspiratorial familiarity. Now, before knocking, he called from outside the door, ‘A
telegram, inspector!'

He very much wanted to enter the room, as Moers and his mysterious work intrigued him. Seeing that the officer was about to close the door again, he asked cheerfully, ‘And what can I bring you for lunch, inspector?'

‘Nothing,' said Maigret curtly. He had opened the telegram. It was from headquarters in Paris; Maigret had asked for certain information. It said:

Émile Gallet left no will. Estate consists of Saint-Fargeau house, estimated value a hundred thousand with furniture, three thousand five hundred francs deposited in bank.

Aurore Gallet gets life insurance three hundred thousand taken out by husband with Abeille company 1925.

Henry Gallet back at work Sovrinos bank.

Éléonore Boursang out of Paris on holiday in Loire valley.

‘Good heavens,' muttered Maigret, looking into space for a moment and then, turning to Moers, said, ‘Do you know anything about life insurance?'

‘That depends,' said the young man modestly. He was wearing a pair of pince-nez fitting so tightly that his whole face looked contracted.

‘In 1925 Gallet was over forty-five. And he had liver trouble. How much a year do you think he had to pay for life insurance worth 300,000 francs?'

Moers moved his lips silently. The arithmetic took him less than two minutes.

‘About 20,000 francs a year,' he said at last. ‘All the same … it can't have been easy to persuade a company to take the risk!'

The inspector cast a furious glance at the portrait photo, still standing on the mantelpiece at the same angle as on the piano in Saint-Fargeau.

‘Twenty thousand! And he was spending barely 2,000 a month! In other words, about half of what he was painfully squeezing out of the supporters of the Bourbons!'

His eyes moved on from the photograph to the shapeless black trousers, baggy at the knees and shiny, stretched out on the floor. And he summoned up the image of
Madame Gallet with her mauve silk dress,
her jewellery, her cutting voice.