The Late Monsieur Gallet Read Online Free PDF

touch anything … huh! You never know where a thing like this will lead you.’

3. Henry Gallet’s Replies
    Maigret, who had spent the night at home in the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, arrived in Saint-Fargeau on the Wednesday a little before eight in the morning. He was already out of the station when he had second thoughts, retraced his steps and asked
the clerk in the ticket office, ‘Did Monsieur Gallet often travel by train?’
    â€˜Father or son?’
    â€˜The father.’
    â€˜He went away for three weeks every month. He travelled second class to Rouen.’
    â€˜What about the son?’
    â€˜He arrives from Paris almost every Saturday evening on a third-class return ticket, and goes back by the last train on Sunday … Who could ever have foreseen that …! I can still see him opening the fishing
season …’
    â€˜Father or son?’
    â€˜The father, for heaven’s sake! By the way, the blue skiff you can see among the trees is his. Everyone’s going to want to buy that skiff. He made it himself out of best oak, thinking up all sorts of little improvements. It was
like the gadgets he made …’
    Conscientiously, Maigret added this little detail to the still very sketchy idea he had of the dead man. He looked at the skiff, the Seine, tried to imagine the man with the
goatee beard sitting
perfectly still for hours with a bamboo fishing rod in his hand.
    Then he set off for Les Marguerites, noticing that an empty, fairly well-appointed hearse was travelling the same way. There was no one to be seen near the house, except for a man pushing a wheelbarrow, who stopped at the sight of the hearse, no
doubt interested to see the funeral procession.
    The bell on the gate had been wrapped in a linen cloth, and the front door was draped in black, with the dead man’s initials picked out in silver embroidery.
    Maigret had not expected so much pomp and ceremony. To the left, in the corridor, there was a tray with a single card on it, one corner turned down, from the Mayor of Saint-Fargeau.
    The sitting room where Madame Gallet had received the inspector had been turned into a temporary chapel of rest. Its furniture must have been moved into the dining room. Black hangings covered the walls, and the coffin stood in the middle of the
room, surrounded by candles.
    It was hard to say why the scene seemed so odd. Perhaps because there were no visitors, and you could guess that there would not be any, although the hearse was already at the door.
    That lone visiting card, a fake lithograph! All those silver tears! And two silhouettes, one on each side of the coffin: Madame Gallet on the right in full mourning, a crape veil over her face, a rosary of matt beads in her fingers; Henry Gallet
on the left, also entirely in funereal black.
    Maigret moved forward in silence, dipped a sprig of box into the holy water and sprinkled the water over the coffin. He felt that mother and son were following him with their eyes, but no one said a word. Then he moved back into a
corner, on the alert for sounds from outside and at the same time watching the young man’s facial expressions. Sometimes one of the horses drawing the hearse pawed the path with a hoof. The undertakers’ men were talking under their
breath out in the sunlight, close to the window. In the funereal room, lit only by the candles, young Monsieur Gallet’s irregular face looked even more irregular because all the black emphasized the unhealthy pallor of his skin. His hair, separated by a parting, clung close to his
scalp. He had a high, bumpy forehead. It was difficult to catch his troubled gaze as he peered short-sightedly through the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses.
    Sometimes Madame Gallet dabbed her eyes with her mourning handkerchief. Henry’s gaze never focused on anything for long. It slid over things, always avoiding the inspector, who was relieved to hear the steps of