The Late Monsieur Gallet (6 page)

‘May I take this file away?'

She turned to the door as if to consult her son, but
Henry had not followed them. ‘But what can it possibly tell you? It's a kind of relic … Still, if you think. … Oh,
but listen, inspector, it surely must be impossible that Monsieur Niel said … I mean, it's like those postcards! I had another one yesterday, and in his writing, I'm sure of it. Sent from Rouen, like the other card. Read it!
All going well. Will be home on
Thursday …
' Once again some emotion broke through, but with difficulty. ‘I shall almost be expecting him. Thursday is tomorrow.' And she suddenly burst into a fit of tears, but an extraordinarily brief one, just two or three hiccups. She raised her
black-bordered handkerchief to her mouth and said in a muted voice, ‘Well, let's not stay here.'

They had to go through the bedroom again with its walnut furniture – ordinary but of good quality: a wardrobe with a full-length mirror on it, two bedside tables and an imitation Persian carpet.

Down in the ground-floor corridor, Henry was watching the upholsterers loading the draperies into a van without seeming to see them. He did not even turn his head when Maigret and his mother descended the polished staircase, causing the stairs to
creak.

There was an untidy look to the house. The maid came into the sitting room, carrying a litre of red wine and glasses. Two men in overalls were dragging the piano back into it.

‘Won't do us any harm!' one of the men was saying indifferently.

Maigret had an impression that he had never had before, and it unnerved him. It seemed to him that the whole truth was here, scattered round him, and everything he saw had its meaning. But to understand it, he would have
had to see it clearly, not through a sort of fog that distorted the view. And the fog persisted, created by this woman who resisted her emotions, by Henry whose long face was as impregnable as a safe, by the black draperies now on their way out, in fact by
everything and most of all by Maigret's own discomfort, out of place as he was in this house.

He felt ashamed of the pink file that he was taking away like a thief, and he would have had difficulty in explaining why it might come in useful. He would have liked to stay upstairs for some time, alone in the dead man's study, and wander
round the shed where Émile Gallet worked on perfecting his fishing equipment.

There was a moment of wavering, with everyone coming and going in the corridor at once. It was lunchtime, and it was obvious that the Gallets were only waiting for the police officer to leave. A smell of fried onions came from the kitchen. The
maid was as distraught as the others. All anyone could do was watch the upholsterers restoring the sitting room to its usual state. One of them found the photo of Gallet underneath a tray of liqueurs.

‘May I take that with me?' Maigret intervened, turning to the widow. ‘I may need it.'

He sensed that Henry's eyes were following him with more scorn than ever.

‘If you must … I don't have many photographs of him.'

‘I promise to let you have it back.'

He could not bring himself to leave. At the moment when the workmen were unceremoniously carrying in an enormous fake Sèvres vase, Madame Gallet hurried forwards.

‘Careful! You're going to collide with the mantelpiece.'

And the same mixture of grief and the grotesque, the dramatic and the petty, was still weighing down on Maigret's shoulders in this desolate house, where he felt as if he could see Émile Gallet,
whom he had not known alive, wandering in silence, his eyes ashen with his liver trouble, his chest hollow, wearing his poorly cut jacket.

He had slipped the portrait photo into the pink file. He hesitated.

‘Please forgive me again, madame … I'm leaving, but I'd be glad if your son would come a little way with me.'

Madame Gallet looked at Henry with an anxiety that she could not repress. For all her dignified manner, her measured gestures, her triple necklace of black stones, she too must be feeling
something
in the air.

But the young man himself, indifferent to anything of the kind, went to collect his hat with its crape hatband from a hook.

Their departure seemed more like an escape. The file was heavy. It was only a cardboard folder, and the papers threatened to fall out.

‘Would you like some newspaper to wrap that in?' asked Madame Gallet.

But Maigret was already out of the house, and the maid was making for the dining room with a tablecloth and some knives. Henry was walking towards the station, tall and silent, his expression inscrutable.

When the two men were 300 metres away from the house, and the upholsterers were starting the engine of their van, the inspector said, ‘I only want to ask you for two things: first Éléonore Boursang's address in Paris, and second your
own, and the address of the bank where you work.'

He found a pencil in his pocket and wrote on the pink cover of the file he was holding:

Éléonore Boursang, 27 Rue de Turenne. Banque Sovrinos, 117 Boulevard Beaumarchais. Henry Gallet, Hôtel Bellevue, 19 Rue de la Roquette.

‘Is that all?' asked the young man.

‘Thank you, yes.'

‘In that case I hope you'll be putting your mind to the murderer now.'

He did not try to judge the effect of this remark, but touched the brim of his hat and set off back up the central avenue.

The van passed Maigret just before he reached the station.

The last fact he picked up that day was by sheer chance. Maigret arrived at the station an hour before the train was due in and found himself alone in the deserted waiting room, in the middle of a swarm of flies. Then he saw a postman with the
purple neck of an apoplectic arrive on a bicycle and put his bags down on the table for luggage.

‘Do you call at Les Marguerites?' asked the inspector.

The postman, who had not noticed him, swung round. ‘What did you say?'

‘Police! Do you get a lot of mail to be delivered to Monsieur Gallet?'

‘A lot, no. Letters from the firm the poor gentleman worked for. They always came on a certain day. And then there were newspapers …'

‘What newspapers?'

‘Provincial papers, mostly from the Berry and Cher regions. And magazines:
Country Lifestyles
,
Hunting and Fishing
,
Country Homes
 …'

The inspector noticed that the postman was avoiding his eyes.

‘Is there a poste restante office in Saint-Fargeau?'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Didn't Monsieur Gallet get any other letters?'

The postman suddenly seemed flustered. ‘Well, seeing as you know, and seeing as he's dead,' he stammered. ‘And anyway it's not like I was even breaking the rules … he just asked me not to put some letters
into the box but keep them until he was back, when he went away …'

‘What letters?'

‘Oh, not many … hardly one every two or three months. Blue envelopes, the cheap sort, with the address typed.'

‘They didn't have the sender's address on them?'

‘Not the address, no. But I couldn't go wrong because it said on the back, and that was typed too,
From: Monsieur Jacob.
Did I do wrong?'

‘Where did these letters come from?'

‘Paris.'

‘I suppose you didn't notice the arrondissement?'

‘I did look … but it changed every time.'

‘When did the last one arrive?'

‘Let's see … today is the 29th, right? Wednesday. Well, it was Thursday evening, but I didn't see Monsieur Gallet until Friday morning, when he was going fishing …'

‘So he went fishing?'

‘No, he went home after he gave me five francs, same as usual. I came over all funny when I heard he'd been killed … do you think that letter …?'

‘Did he leave that same day?'

‘Yes … hey, is it the train from Melun you're waiting
for? They just rang the bell at the level crossing … Will you have to mention this to anyone?'

Maigret had no time to do anything but run to the platform and jump into the only first-class carriage.

Arriving for the second time at the Hôtel de la Loire, Maigret responded without warmth to Monsieur Tardivon, who received him with a confidential air, took him to his room and showed him some large yellow envelopes that had arrived for him. They
contained the coroner's report and the reports of the gendarmerie and the Nevers municipal police. The Rouen police had sent further information about the cashier Irma Strauss.

‘And that's not all!' said the hotel manager exultantly. ‘The sergeant from the gendarmerie came to see you. He wants you to phone him as soon as you arrive. And then there's a woman who's already turned up
three times, no doubt because of the town crier and his sales pitch.'

‘What woman?'

‘Mother Canut, the wife of the gardener opposite. I told you about the little chateau, remember?'

‘Didn't she say anything, then?'

‘She's not that stupid! Since there's a reward on offer she's not about to give anything away, but for all that she may know something.'

Maigret had put the pink file on the table along with the photograph of Gallet.

‘Ask someone to find the woman and get me the gendarmerie on the phone.'

A little later he was speaking to the sergeant, who told
him that, according to instructions, he had picked up all the vagrants in the neighbourhood and was holding them at Maigret's disposal.

‘Anyone interesting among them?'

‘They're vagrants,' was all the sergeant said to that.

Maigret stayed alone in his room for three or four minutes, facing a pile of paperwork. And there was more of it to come! He had sent a telegram to Paris asking for information about Henry Gallet and his mistress, and just in case he had alerted
Orleans to find out if there was a Monsieur Clément in that city.

Finally, he hadn't had time yet to look at the room where the crime was committed, or the clothing worn by the dead man, which had been placed in that room after the post-mortem.

At first the case had looked like nothing to speak of. A man who did not seem out of the ordinary had been killed by someone unknown in a hotel room. But each new item of information complicated the problem instead of simplifying it.

‘Do I get her to come in and see you, inspector?' called a voice in the yard. ‘I've got Mother Canut here.'

A strong, dignified old lady, who had probably cleaned herself up more thoroughly than usual for the occasion, came in, immediately looking for Maigret with the wary glance of a countrywoman.

‘Do you have something to tell me?' he asked. ‘About Monsieur Clément?'

‘It's about the gent who died and got his picture in the paper. You're handing out fifty francs, right?'

‘Yes, if you saw him on Saturday 25 June.'

‘Suppose I saw him twice?'

‘Well, maybe you'll get a hundred! Come on, out with it!'

‘First you've got to promise not to say a word to my old man. It's not so much that he likes to be the boss as on account of the hundred francs. All the same, I'd not like Monsieur Tiburce to know I been talking, because
it was with him I saw the gent who got killed. First time was in the morning, about eleven, when they were walking in the grounds.'

‘Are you sure you recognized him?'

‘Sure as I'd recognize you! There aren't so many look like him. Well, they were chatting for maybe an hour. Then I saw them through the sitting-room window in the afternoon, and it looked like they were arguing.'

‘What time was that?'

‘It had just struck five … so that makes twice, right?'

Her eyes were fixed on Maigret's hand as he took a hundred-franc note out of his wallet, and she sighed as if she was sorry she hadn't stuck close to Monsieur Clément's trail all that Saturday.

‘And could be I saw him a third time,' she said hesitantly, ‘But I s'pose that doesn't count. A few minutes later I saw Monsieur Tiburce taking him back to the gate.'

‘You're right, it doesn't count,' agreed Maigret, impelling her towards the door.

He lit a pipe, put his hat on and stopped opposite Monsieur Tardivon in the café. ‘Has Monsieur de Saint-Hilaire lived in the little chateau for long?'

‘About twenty years.'

‘What kind of man is he?'

‘Very pleasant fellow! A little, fat man, cheerful, straightforward. When I have guests in summer we hardly see
him, because, well, they're not his class. But he often drops in here in the
hunting season.'

‘Does he have any family?'

‘He's a widower. We almost always call him Monsieur Tiburce, because that's not a common first name. He owns all the vines you can see on the slope there. He tends them himself, goes to live it up in Paris now and then and comes
back to get his hobnailed boots. What did Mother Canut have to tell you?'