Eighteen years without being detected!
It was so unlikely. The inspector, who knew the business of crime, was better aware of that than anyone! But for the murder, Gallet would have died peacefully in his bed, after leaving all his papers in order. And Monsieur Niel would have been astonished to get an announcement of his death.
It was so extraordinary that the picture the inspector was constructing for himself made him feel an indefinable anxiety, as if it evoked certain phenomena that shake our sense of reality. So it was pure chance that, as he looked up, the inspector saw a darker mark on the white wall round the property, opposite the room that was the scene of the crime.
He went over and saw that the mark was a space between two stones that had recently been enlarged and scuffed by the toe of a shoe. There was a similar mark a little higher up, but less visible. Someone had climbed up the wall, using a branch that hung down to help him …
At the very moment when he was about to reconstruct the climb, the inspector swung round. He had the impression that there was an unexpected presence at the end of the road, near the Loire.
He was just in time to see a feminine figure, tall and quite strong, with blonde hair and the regular, clear-cut profile of a Greek statue. The young woman had begun walking on when Maigret turned round, which suggested that she had previously been watching him.
A name sprang to the detective’s mind of its own accord: Éléonore Boursang! Up to this point he had not tried to imagine Henry Gallet’s mistress. Yet he was suddenly as good as certain that this was the lady.
He quickened his pace and reached the embankment just as she was turning the corner of the main road.
‘Back in a minute!’ he told the hotelier, who tried to stop him as he was passing.
He ran for a little way while he was out of the fugitive’s sight, to reduce the distance between them. Not only did the woman’s figure suit the name of Éléonore Boursang, she was exactly the woman that a man like Henry would have chosen.
But on arriving at the crossroads himself, Maigret was annoyed. She had disappeared. He looked into the dimly lit window of a small grocery store and then into the forge next to it.
But it did not matter much, since he knew where to find her.
5. The Thrifty Lovers
The sergeant from the gendarmerie must have formed a seductive idea that morning of the kind of life led by a police officer from Paris. He himself had been up at four in the morning and had already cycled some thirty kilometres, first in the early-morning cold, then in increasingly hot sunlight, when he reached the Hôtel de la Loire for the periodic check carried out on the register of its guests.
It was now 10 a.m. Most of the guests were walking beside the water or bathing in the river. Two horse dealers were talking on the terrace, and the hotelier, a napkin in his hand, was making sure that the tables and the bay trees in their containers were lined up properly.
‘Aren’t you going to say good morning to the inspector?’ asked Monsieur Tardivon, and then, lowering his voice to a confidential tone, ‘He’s in the room that was the scene of the crime at this very moment. He’s had all kinds of papers sent to him from Paris, and big photographs too …’
It worked; a little later the sergeant knocked on the door and said, apologetically, ‘It was Monsieur Tardivon, inspector. When he told me you were examining the scene I was tempted … I know you have special methods in Paris … if I’m not in the way I’d really like to learn from seeing how you do it.’
He was an amiable man whose round, pink face showed an ingenuous wish to please, and he made himself as small as possible, not entirely easy in view of his hobnailed boots and his gaiters. He couldn’t decide where to put his képi.
The window was wide open, the morning sun fell right on the nettle lane so that against the light the room was almost dark. And Maigret, in his shirtsleeves, pipe between his teeth, detachable collar unbuttoned, tie loose, gave an impression of well-being that was bound to strike the local policeman.
‘Sit down, do, by all means. But there’s nothing interesting to see, you know.’
‘Oh, you’re too modest, inspector.’
It was so naive that Maigret turned his head to hide a smile. He had brought everything to do with the case into the room with him. After making sure that the table, covered with an Indian tablecloth that had a reddish leaf pattern, could tell him nothing, he had spread out all his files on it, from the medical examiner’s report to photos of the scene and the victim sent to him from Criminal Records that very morning. Finally, giving way to a feeling that was superstitious rather than scientific, he had put the picture of Émile Gallet on the black marble mantelpiece, which had a copper candlestick on it by way of an ornament.
There was no carpet on the varnished oak boards of the floor, on which the first officers to come on the scene had drawn the outline of the body they found there in chalk.
In all the greenery outside the window there was a confused murmuring made up of birdsong, rustling leaves, the buzzing of flies and the distant clucking of chickens on the lane, all of it punctuated by the rhythmic blows of the hammer on the anvil in the forge. Confused voices sometimes came up from the terrace, or the sound of a cart crossing the suspension bridge.
‘Well, you’re not short of documents! I’d never have thought …’
But the inspector wasn’t listening. Calmly, taking little puffs at his pipe, he put a pair of black trousers on the floor where the corpse’s legs had lain. The fabric was such a fine weave that, after having been worn for some ten years, judging by their shininess, they could surely have been worn for another ten.
Maigret also laid out a percale shirt and, in its usual place, a starched shirt-front. However, there was no shape to this collection, and it was only when he put a pair of elastic-sided shoes at the ends of the trouser legs that it became both absurd and touching.
In fact it did not look like a body, it was more of a caricature, and it was so unexpected that the sergeant glanced at his companion and uttered an embarrassed little laugh.
Maigret did not laugh. Heavy and bent on his task, he was walking up and down slowly, conscientiously. He examined the jacket and put it back in the travelling bag, after making sure that there was no hole in the fabric where the blade of the knife had gone in. The waistcoat, which was torn level with its left pocket, took its place on the shirt-front.
‘That’s how he was dressed,’ he said under his breath.
He consulted one of the police photographs and adjusted his handiwork by giving his imaginary dummy a very high detachable celluloid collar and a black satin tie.
‘See that, sergeant? He dined at eight on Saturday – he had some pasta because he was on a diet. Then he read the paper and drank mineral water, as usual. A little while after 10 p.m. he entered this room and took off his jacket, keeping on his shoes and his detachable collar.’
In fact Maigret was talking not so much to the sergeant, who was listening intently and thought it his duty to nod approval of every remark, as to himself.
‘Now where would his knife have been at that moment? It was a pocket flick-knife, the kind a lot of people carry on them. Wait a minute …’
He folded back the blade of the knife that was lying on the table with the other exhibits and slipped it into the left-hand pocket of the black trousers.
‘No, that makes creases in the wrong place.’ He tried the right-hand pocket and seemed satisfied. ‘There we are! He has his knife in his pocket. He’s alive. And between eleven and twelve thirty at night he died. There’s chalk and stone dust on the toes of his shoes. I’ve found marks left by the same kind of shoes opposite the window, on the wall surrounding Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire’s property. Did he take off his jacket to climb the wall? We have to remember that he wasn’t a man to make himsel
f comfortable, even at home.’
Maigret was still walking round the room, leaving some of his sentences unfinished and never glancing at the listener sitting motionless on his chair.
‘I’ve found some remnants of burned paper in the fireplace – they’d taken the stove out of it for the summer. Now let’s go over the movement he must have made: he takes off his jacket, burns the papers, crushes out the ashes with the foot of that candlestick (I found sweat on the copper), he climbs the wall opposite after getting out over the window-sill, and he climbs back in the same way. Then he takes the knife out of his pocket and opens it. It’s not much, but if we knew the order in which those things happened … Between eleven and twelve thirty he’s back here again. The window is open, and someone shoots him in the head. There’s no doubt about that – the bullet came before the knife wound, and it was fired from outside. So Gallet took out his knife. He didn’t try to get out, which would suggest that the murderer came into the room, because you don’t fight someone seven metres away from you with a knife. And there’s more to come: Gallet had half his face blown away. The wound was bleeding, and there’s not a drop of blood to be found near the window. The bloodstains we do find show that, once wounded, he moved in a circle with a diameter of no more than two metres. Severe ecchymosis on left wrist, writes the doctor who performed the post-mortem. So our man is holding his knife in his left hand, and the murderer seized that hand to turn the weapon against him. The blade pierces his heart, and he falls all at once, dropping the knife. That doesn’t bother the murderer, who knows that it will have only the victim’s own fingerprints on it. Gallet’s wallet is still in his pocket; nothing has been stolen from him. However, Criminal Records claims that there are tiny traces of rubber on the travelling bag in particular, as if someone had been holding it with rubber gloves on.’
‘Strange! Very strange!’ said the delighted sergeant, although he would not have been able to repeat a quarter of what had been said.
‘The strangest thing of all is that as well as those traces of rubber they found some powdered rust.’
‘Maybe the revolver was rusty!’
Maigret said nothing in reply to this but went to stand at the window, where, looking somewhat unkempt, with the sleeves of his white shirt billowing out, his outline looked enormous against the lighted rectangle. A thin trail of blue smoke rose in the air above his head. The sergeant stayed in his corner, hesitating even to change the position of his legs.
‘Didn’t you want to see my vagrants?’ he asked timidly.
‘Oh, are they still there? You can let them go again.’
Maigret went back to the table, rubbing his hair up the wrong way, tapped the pink file, changed the place of the photos and looked at the other man.
‘Did you come on a bicycle? Would you go to the railway station and ask what time Henry Gallet – young man of about twenty-five, tall, thin, pale, dark clothes, horn-rimmed glasses – took the train to Paris on Saturday? And by the way, have you ever heard of a Monsieur Jacob?’
‘Only the one in the Bible,’ ventured the sergeant.
Émile Gallet’s clothes were still on the floor, like the caricature of a corpse. Just as the sergeant was making for the door, someone knocked. It was Monsieur Tardivon, who said, ‘Someone to see you, inspector! A lady called Boursang who says she’d like a word with you.’
The sergeant would have liked to stay, but his companion did not invite him to do so. After a satisfied glance round the room, Maigret said, ‘Show her in.’
And he leaned down to his insubstantial tailor’s dummy, hesitated, smiled, planted the knife in the place where the heart would have been and tamped the tobacco down in his pipe with one finger.
• • •
Éléonore Boursang was wearing a pale, well-cut skirt suit, well cut although, far from making her appear youthful, it made her look nearer to thirty-five than thirty. Her stockings fitted nicely, her shoes were well chosen, and her fair hair was carefully arranged under a white straw toque. She was wearing gloves.
Maigret had withdrawn into a shady corner, interested to see how she would present herself. When Monsieur Tardivon left her at the door she stopped, apparently taken aback by the sharp contrasts of light and shadow inside the room.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Maigret?’ she asked at last, taking a few steps forwards and turning to the silhouette against the window, at whose identity she could so far only guess. ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you.’
He came over to her, entering the light. When he had closed the door again, he said, ‘Please sit down.’
And he waited. His attitude gave her no help at all; on the contrary, he assumed a cantankerous manner.
‘Henry must have mentioned me to you, and so when I found myself in Sancerre I hoped it would be all right to speak to you.’
He still said nothing, but he had not managed to upset her. She spoke with composure, with a certain dignity that almost reminded him of Madame Gallet. A younger Madame Gallet, and no doubt a little prettier than Henry’s mother had been, but just as representative of the same social class.
‘You must understand my situation. After that … that dreadful tragedy, I wanted to leave Sancerre, but Henry wrote a letter advising me to stay here. I’ve seen you two or three times, and the local people told me that you were in charge of the attempts to track down the murderer. So I decided to come and ask if you had found anything out. I’m in a delicate situation, given that officially I don’t have any connection with Henry or his family …’
It didn’t sound like a speech she had prepared in advance. The words came easily to her lips, and she spoke with composure. Several times her eyes had gone to the knife placed on the bizarre shape traced by the clothes lying on the floor, but she had not flinched at the sight of it.
‘So your lover has told you to pick my brains?’ said Maigret suddenly, his voice intentionally harsh.
‘He didn’t tell me to do anything! He’s devastated by what happened. And one of the worst things about it is that I couldn’t be at the funeral with him.’
‘Have you known him for long?’
She did not seem to notice that the conversation had turned into an interrogation. Her voice remained level.
‘Three years. I’m thirty, while Henry is only twenty-five. And I’m a widow.’
‘Are you a native of Paris?’
‘No, I’m from Lille. My father is chief accountant in a textile factory, and when I was twenty I married a textiles engineer who was killed in an accident by a machine a month after our wedding. I ought to have been paid a pension at once by the firm that employed him, but they claimed that the accident was because of my husband’s own carelessness. So as I had to earn my own living, and I didn’t want to take a job in a place where everyone knew me, I went to Paris and started work as a cashier in a shop in Rue Réaumur. I brought an action against the textiles factory. The case went on and on through the courts, and it was settled in my favour only two years ago. Once I knew that I would not be in want I was able to leave my job.’
‘So you were working as a cashier when you met Henry Gallet?’
‘Yes, he’s a direct marketing agent, and he often came to see my employers on behalf of the Sovrinos Bank.’
‘Didn’t the two of you ever think of marrying?’
‘We did discuss it at first, but if I had married again before my case was decided in court I wouldn’t have been in such a good position over the pension.’
‘So you became Henry Gallet’s mistress?’
‘Yes, I’m not afraid of the word. He and I are united just as much as if we’d gone through a wedding ceremony at the town hall. We’ve been seeing each other daily for the last three years, and he eats all his meals at my place …’
‘But he doesn’t actually live with you in Rue
de Turenne?’
‘That’s because of his family. They have very strict principles, like my own parents. Henry decided he’d rather avoid friction with his by leaving them in ignorance of our relationship. But all the same it’s always been agreed that when there are no more obstacles and we have enough to go and live in the south of France we’ll get married.’
She showed no embarrassment even when faced with the most indiscreet questions. Now and then, when the inspector’s eyes went to her legs, she simply pulled her skirt down.
‘I have to go into all the details. So Henry was eating his meals with you … did he contribute to the expenses?’
‘Oh, that’s very simple! I kept accounts, as you do in any well-organized household, and at the end of the month he gave me half of what had been spent on our food and drink.’
‘You mentioned going to live in the south of the country. Was Henry managing to put some money aside?’
‘Yes, just like me! You must have noticed that his constitution isn’t very strong. The doctors say he needs good fresh air. But you can’t live out of doors when you have to earn a living and you don’t have a manual job. I love the country too. So we live modestly. As I told you, Henry is a direct marketing agent for Sovrinos – a small bank concentrating mainly on speculation. So he was at the source of it here, and we used everything we could save one way or another to invest on the stock exchange.’
‘You have separate accounts?’
‘Of course! We never know what the future has in store for us, do we?’
‘And what capital have you built up in this way?’
‘It’s hard to say exactly, because the money is in securities, and they change value from one day to the next. Around 40,000 to 50,000 francs.’
‘And Gallet?’
‘Oh, more than that! He didn’t always like to let me embark on risky speculations like the mines of Plata last August. At the moment he must have about 100,000 francs.’
The Late Monsieur Gallet Page 6