The Late Monsieur Gallet (17 page)

‘And who lived in Indochina, I believe?'

‘In Indochina, yes. A distant relation who didn't even bear our name. A Duranty de la Roche.'

‘At what age did you get this legacy?'

‘I was twenty-eight.'

‘So that from the age of nineteen to twenty-eight …'

‘I had a hard time, yes. I don't blush to say so, far from it. Inspector, it's getting late. Wouldn't it be better if we …'

‘Just a moment. I haven't yet shown you what can be done with a well and a hotel bedroom. You don't have a revolver on you, I suppose? Never mind, I have mine. There must be some string around somewhere. Right, follow my
movements. I tie this string to the butt of the
weapon. Let's suppose it measures six or seven metres, or more, that's of no importance. Now, go and find me a large pebble in the road.'

Once again Saint-Hilaire was quick to obey and brought back the stone.

‘Your left hand again,' Maigret commented. ‘Never mind that. So I tie this pebble firmly to the other end of the string. We can have our demonstration here, if we suppose that the window-sill is the rim of the well. I let my
stone down on the other side of it. Yes, that's right, into the well. I have the revolver in my hand. I aim at something, never mind what. Myself, for instance … Then I let go. And what happens? The stone, which is dangling above the water, goes down to the bottom of the
well, taking with it the string and the revolver tied to the other end. The police arrive to find a dead body, but no trace of a weapon … and what do they deduce from that?'

‘A crime has been committed!'

‘Very good,' said Maigret, and without asking for his companion's lighter he lit his pipe with matches taken from his pocket.

As he picked up Gallet's clothes, with the look of a man pleased with a long day's work, he said in the most natural voice imaginable, ‘So now go and find me the revolver.'

‘But … but you didn't let go of it. You're holding it in your hand.'

‘I mean go and find me the revolver that killed Émile Gallet. And hurry up about it.'

So saying, he hung the trousers and waistcoat on the hook in the room, beside the close-fitting jacket with its shiny elbows that was hanging there already.

Now that Maigret's back was turned to him, Saint-Hilaire no longer kept firm control of the expression on his face, and a strange mixture of anxiety, hatred and, in spite of everything, a kind of self-assurance could be seen on it.

‘What are you waiting for?'

He decided to go out through the window, walked over to the barred gate in the nettle road and disappeared into the grounds, all so slowly that the inspector, slightly worried, strained his ears to hear him.

It was the time of day when you could see, on the riverbank, the luminous halo of light from the terrace, where knives and forks clicked on plates, accompanied by the muted murmuring of the hotel guests' voices. Suddenly branches moved on
the other side of the wall. The darkness was so complete that Maigret could hardly make out the figure of Saint-Hilaire on top of it. Another creaking of branches. A voice calling softly. ‘Would you like to take it?'

The inspector shrugged his shoulders and did not move, so that his companion had to make the same journey in reverse. When he was in the hotel room again he firstly put a gun on the table. He had straightened his back, and he touched
Maigret's arm with an almost casual, albeit slightly gauche, gesture.

‘What would you say to two hundred thousand?' He
had to cough. He would have liked to act the
grand seigneur
, completely at ease, but at the same time he felt himself blushing, and
there was an obstruction in his throat. ‘Hmm … maybe three …?'

Unfortunately, when Maigret looked at him without any emotion or anger, only a touch of irony between his thick eyelids, he lost his footing, stepped back and cast a glance all around him, as if to catch hold of something.

It was a swift transformation. The best he could manage was a coarse smile, which did not keep him from going purple in the face or the pupils of his eyes from shining with anxiety. He had not brought off his act as a
grand seigneur
, so
he tried another, more cynical and down to earth.

‘That's your bad luck! Anyway, I was being naive – what could you do about it? You have to obey the rules.'

That sounded just as false, and by way of contrast Maigret had probably never conveyed such an impression of quiet, confident power. He was enormous. When he was just below the ceiling light, he touched it with the top of his head, and his
shoulders filled the rectangle of the window, in the same way as the lords of the Middle Ages with their huge sleeves fill the frames of old pictures. He was still slowly tidying up the room.

‘Because you know I didn't kill anyone, don't you?' said Saint-Hilaire in a fevered tone. He took his handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose noisily.

‘Sit down,' Maigret told him.

‘I'd rather stand …'

‘Sit down!'

He obeyed, like a frightened child, the moment when the inspector turned to face him. He had a shifty look in
his eyes, and the defeated face of a man who does not feel up to his role, and is trying to
swim upstream again.

‘I imagine,' grunted Maigret, ‘that it won't be necessary for me to get the inspector of indirect taxes for Nevers to come and identify his old comrade Émile Gallet? Oh, I'd have worked out the truth without him; it
would have taken longer, that's all. I felt for too long anyway that there was something creaky about this story. You needn't try to understand, but when all the material clues manage to confuse matters rather than clarify them, it means they've been faked … and
everything, without exception,
is
fake in this case. It all creaked. The gunshot and the knife wound. The room looking out on the courtyard and the wall. Severe bruising on the left wrist and the lost key … and even the three possible suspects. But most of all Gallet. He
sounded as wrong dead as he did living. If the inspector of taxes hadn't spoken up, I was going to go to the school he attended, and I'd have found out the truth there. By the way, you can't have stayed very long at the school in Nantes.'

‘Two years! They chucked me out.'

‘Good heavens. You were playing football already – and no doubt chasing the girls! Can you hear how the story creaks? Look at this photograph – go on, look at it! At the age when you were climbing the school wall to go and meet your
girlfriends, this poor fellow was worrying about his liver. I ought to have devoted some time to collecting the proofs, but I knew what mattered most: my man, who needed 20,000 francs in a hurry, was in Sancerre only to ask you for the money. And you talked to him
twice
! Then, in
the evening, you were watching him over the wall! You were afraid he was going to kill himself, am I right? Perhaps he even told you he was?'

‘No! But he seemed to me feverish. In the afternoon he was talking in an abrupt tone that made quite an impression on me.'

‘And you refused him his 20,000 francs?'

‘I couldn't do anything else … it was beginning all over again. In the end I think I'd have been broke.'

‘It was at your notary's in Saigon that you learned he was going to inherit?'

‘Yes … an odd sort of client had come to see my boss. An old maniac who'd been living in the sticks for over twenty years, didn't see another white man more than one year in every three. His health was undermined by
fevers and opium abuse. I heard their conversation. I'm not long for this world, that's literally what he said, and I don't even know if I have any family somewhere. Could be there's a Saint-Hilaire left, but I doubt it because when I left France the last of them was
in such a bad way I guess he's died of consumption. If there's a descendant, and if you can track him down, then he'll be my sole heir.'

‘So you already had the bright idea of getting rich at a stroke!' said Maigret thoughtfully. And behind the sweating, ill-at-ease fifty-year-old man before him he thought he could see the unscrupulous jolly companion who organized a
grotesque ceremony to get his hands on a young Malay girl.

‘Go on.'

‘I had to go back to France anyway. It was about women … I went too far when I was out there. There were husbands and brothers and fathers who bore me a grudge. So I had the idea of looking for a Saint-Hilaire, and I can tell you
it wasn't easy. I picked up the trail of Tiburce at the school in Bourges. They told me they had
no idea what had become of him. I knew he was a gloomy young man, reserved, who never had a friend at school …'

‘Good God!' Maigret laughed. ‘He never had a penny in his pocket! There was just enough money to pay for his board until he'd finished his studies.'

‘My idea at that moment was to share the inheritance by some means or other, I didn't yet know just how. But I realized it would be harder to share it than to take the lot. It took me three months to lay hands on him, in Le Havre,
where he was trying to get taken on as a steward or interpreter on a liner. He had ten or twelve francs left … I bought him a drink and then I had to get the information out of him word by word – he never replied except in monosyllables. He'd been a tutor at a chateau, a
proof-reader, an assistant in a bookshop … he already wore a ridiculous jacket and a strange straggly beard, reddish-brown … So I staked everything on getting it all. I told him I wanted to go to America and make my fortune and I said that out there nothing helps a man
more, particularly with women, than an aristocratic name, and I offered to buy his. I had a little money, because my father, a horse dealer in Nantes, had left me a small sum of money. I paid 30,000 francs for the right to call myself Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire.'

Maigret cast a brief glance at the portrait photograph, inspected the man he was talking to from head to toe and then looked straight into his eyes in such a way that he began talking at exaggerated speed of his own accord.

‘It's what a financier does, isn't it? He buys up securities at 200 francs because he knows he can sell them for five times more a month later. But I had to wait four years to inherit! The old madman out there in his jungle
couldn't
make up his mind to die. I was the one who almost died of starvation now that I had no money.

‘As for the real Saint-Hilaire, we were almost the same age. All we'd had to do was exchange our papers. The other man promised never to set foot in Nantes, where he might have met someone who knew me. As for me, I had to take hardly
any precautions. The real Tiburce had never had any friends, and in his various jobs he often didn't use his real name, which didn't sound right for him … I mean, how many bookshop assistants are called Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire? Well, at long last I read a little
paragraph in the newspapers about the old man's estate and asking anyone with a claim to make himself known. Don't you think I earned the 1,200,000 francs that the old man in the backwoods left?'

He was recovering his self-confidence, encouraged by Maigret's silence, and looked as if he might almost have winked at him.

‘Of course, Gallet, who had just got married at that point and wasn't rolling in money, turned up and blamed me for his plight – there was a moment when I thought he was going to kill me. I offered him 10,000 francs, and he finally
took them. But he came back six months later … and then he came back again. He was threatening to tell the truth. I tried to show him that he'd be thought as culpable as me. What was more, he had a family – and he seemed afraid of that family. Gradually he calmed
down … he was ageing fast. I really felt sorry for him with his close-fitting jacket, his beard, his yellow skin and the rings round his eyes. His manner was becoming more and more like a beggar's. He always began by asking me for 50,000 francs – just once and never again, he
swore. Then I would fob
him off with 1,000- or 2,000-franc notes. But add up those sums over eighteen years! I tell you again that if I hadn't stood firm I'd have been the loser. I was working hard, at that! I was looking for good
investments. I planted all the land you see on the higher reaches of the property with vines. While he, on the other hand, was claiming to be a commercial traveller, but the truth was that he was nothing but a scrounger … and he got a taste for it. Under the name of Monsieur
Clément, as you know, he went around looking for people … well, so tell me, what should I have done?'

His voice rose, and automatically he got to his feet.

‘So on the Saturday in question he wanted 20,000 francs on the spot. I might have been inclined to give them to him, but I couldn't, because the bank was closed. And then again I'd paid enough, don't you think? I told him
so. I told him he was degenerate. He returned to the attack that afternoon, taking such a humble tone that it disgusted me. A real man has no right to let himself sink to such a level as that! A man stakes his life, he wins or he loses, but he keeps more pride than that!'