Read Online The Late Monsieur Gallet by Georges Simenon - Free Book Online Page B

imaginary dummy a very high detachable celluloid collar and a black satin tie.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 himself 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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Strange! Very strange!’ said the delighted sergeant, although he would not have been able to repeat a quarter of what had been said.
    â€˜The strangest thing of all is that as well as those traces of rubber they found some powdered rust.’
    â€˜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