The Late Monsieur Gallet by Georges Simenon Page B

scratches on the stone, but nowhere else.
    As the moss was fragile, as he quickly established, he felt absolutely certain that Émile Gallet had not walked along the wall, not even as much as a metre either way.
    So now to find out if he came down on the side of the Saint-Hilaire property …
    Strictly speaking, this place was not really part of the grounds, no doubt because the area was hidden behind a great many trees and served as a kind of outdoor lumber room. A dozen metres from Maigret, there were piles of old barrels, empty,
stove in or minus their hoops. There were also old bottles, several of which had held pharmaceuticals, crates, a decrepit mower, rusty tools and packages of old numbers of a comic magazine tied up with string. Soaked with rain, dried and discoloured by the sun, stained by the soil, they were
a sad sight.
    Before climbing down from the wall, Maigret made sure that just below him, in fact just below the place that Gallet
must have occupied on the wall himself, there were no markings on the ground. He
jumped so as not to risk scratching the wall and was rewarded by landing on all fours.
    There was nothing to be seen of Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire’s villa apart from a few light-coloured patches in the filigree pattern of the foliage. An engine was chugging, and Maigret now knew that it was pumping water from the well into
stocks for the household.
    This corner of the park was full of flies because of all the rubbish. The inspector had to keep shooing them away, and did so in an increasingly bad temper.
    First for the wall, he thought.
    The examination of the wall was easy. It had been given a coat of whitewash on both sides in spring. Maigret could see that there was no trace of any mark or scratch underneath the place where Émile Gallet had climbed the wall, and no footprints
for ten metres anywhere near.
    However, near the casks and bottles the inspector noticed that a barrel had been dragged two or three metres and then stood on end at the foot of the wall. It was still there. He got up on it, and his head came above the top of the wall exactly
ten and a half metres from the place where Gallet had been stationed. Furthermore, from where he was he saw Moers still at work, not even taking time off to mop his face.
    â€˜Found anything?’
    â€˜
Clignancourt
 … but I think I have a better fragment here.’
    The moss on the wall above the barrel had not been torn away, but looked as if it had been crushed by arms pressing on it. Maigret tried leaning on his elbows and got the identical result a little further along.
    In other words, he reflected, Émile Gallet gets up on the wall
but does not come down on the side of Saint-Hilaire’s property.
On the other hand, someone coming from inside the
Saint-Hilaire property hauls himself up on that barrel
but goes no higher and does not leave the enclosure of the grounds, or at least not that way.
    For that to make any sense, the couple going for a nocturnal expedition would have had to be a young man and a girl. And whichever of them had stayed inside the wall could have brought the barrel as close to the other as possible.
    But this couldn’t have been a lovers’ meeting! One of the couple must certainly have been Monsieur Gallet, who had taken off his jacket before embarking on an exercise which was far from compatible with his character.
    Was the other one Tiburce de Saint-Hilaire?
    The two men had seen each other first that morning, then in the afternoon, quite openly. It was not very likely that they had decided on such a roundabout way of seeing each other again after dark!
    And at a distance of ten metres from one another they wouldn’t even have been able to hear each other if they spoke in an undertone.
    Unless, thought Maigret, they had come separately, first one and then the other … but which of the two had hoisted himself up on the wall first? And had the two men met?
    It was about seven