The Late Monsieur Gallet by Georges Simenon Page A

on one of the sheets of glass. The ash was fragile and brittle, ready to crumble to bits. Sometimes it took five minutes to soften it by surrounding it with water vapour, and then it was stuck on the glass.
    Opposite him, Joseph Moers had a small case which was a veritable portable laboratory. The larger pieces of charred paper measured seven to eight centimetres. The smaller pieces were mere dust.
    â€¦Â bution … prepara … I … yo
    That was the result of two hours of work, but, unlike Maigret, Moers was not impatient and did not flinch at the thought that he had examined only about one-hundredth of a part of the contents of the fireplace. A large purple fly was buzzing as
it circled round his head. It settled on his frowning brow three times, and he didn’t even raise a hand to brush it away. Perhaps he didn’t even notice it.
    However, he did tell Maigret, ‘The trouble is that when you come in through the doorway you set up a draught! You’ve already lost me some ash like that.’
    â€˜Oh, all right! I’ll come in through the window!’
    It was not a joke. He did it. The files were still in this room, which Maigret had chosen as a study, and where the clothes spread on the floor with a knife piercing them had not even been touched. The inspector was impatient to know the result
of the expertise he had summoned to his aid, and as he waited he could hardly keep still.
    For quarter of an hour, he could be seen walking up and down the lane with his head bent, hands clasped
behind his back. Then he straddled the window-sill, his skin burning in the sunlight and shiny; he
mopped his brow and growled, ‘Slow work, if you ask me!’
    Did Moers even hear him? His movements were as precise as a manicurist’s, and his mind was entirely on the sheets of glass that he was covering with irregularly outlined black marks.
    The main reason why Maigret was agitated was that he had nothing to do, or rather he thought it was better not to try doing anything before he had a clear idea of what was on the paper burned on the night of the crime. And as he paced up and down
the lane, where the oak leaves cast dappled light and shade on him, he kept going over the same ideas.
    Henry and Éléonore Boursang could have killed Gallet before going to the station, he thought. Éléonore could have come back on her own to kill him after seeing her lover off on the train … and then there’s that wall, and that key!
What’s more, there was a certain Monsieur Jacob, the man whose letters Gallet was fearfully hiding …
    He went back ten times to examine the lock of the barred gate, without finding anything new. Then, as he was passing the spot where Émile Gallet had climbed the wall, he suddenly went into action himself, took off his jacket and put the toe of
his right shoe into the first join between the stones. He weighed a good hundred kilos, but he had no difficulty in grasping the hanging branches, and once he had a hold on them it was child’s play to finish the climb.
    The wall was made of irregular stones covered with a coat of whitewash. On top of it was a row of bricks set edgeways. Moss had invaded them, and there was even grass growing and flourishing.
    From his perch, Maigret had an excellent view of Moers deciphering something through his magnifying glass.
    â€˜Anything new?’ he called.
    â€˜An
s
and a comma.’
    Above his head the inspector now had not oak leaves, but the foliage of an enormous beech tree, its trunk coming up from the property on the other side of the wall.
    He knelt down, because the top of the wall was not wide, and he was not sure of keeping his balance on his feet, examined the moss to right and left of him and murmured, ‘Well, well!’
    Not that his discovery was sensational. It consisted solely of the fact that the moss had been scuffed and even partly removed at a spot directly above the