The Late Monsieur Gallet by Georges Simenon

and stout, red-faced, with short hands not very well cared for, wearing an off-the-peg khaki hunting and fishing outfit.
    â€˜Did you know Monsieur Clément?’ asked Maigret, sitting down on one of the wrought-iron chairs.
    â€˜According to the newspaper that wasn’t his real name, he was called … what was it? … Grelet? Gellet?’
    â€˜Gallet, yes. It doesn’t matter. Were you in business with him?’
    At that moment, Maigret could have sworn that the other man was not entirely at his ease. Furthermore, Saint-Hilaire felt a need to lean forwards out of the arbour, murmuring, ‘That fool Baptiste is perfectly capable of bringing us the
demi-sec, and I’m sure you’d rather have the sec, like me. It’s our own wine, made by the champenoise method … Now, about this Monsieur Clément – might as well go on calling him that – what shall I say? It would be exaggerating to say I was in business with him!
But it wouldn’t be exactly true to say I’d never seen him either …’
    As he was talking, Maigret thought of another interrogation, the questions he had asked Henry Gallet. The two men had entirely different attitudes. The murder victim’s son did nothing to appear
likeable, and he didn’t care about the oddity of his attitude either. He waited for questions with a suspicious air, took his time and weighed up his words.
    Tiburce talked away with animation, smiled, gestured with his hands, paced up and down, appeared extremely friendly – and yet there was the same latent anxiety in each of them: perhaps the fear of being unable to hide something.
    â€˜Well, you know how it is. We country landowners come into contact with all sorts. And I’m not just talking about vagrants, commercial travellers, peripatetic salesmen. Now, to return to this Monsieur Clément … Ah, here
comes the wine! That’s fine, Baptiste. Right, you can be off now. I’ll come and look at that sprinkler soon. Whatever you do don’t touch it.’
    As he spoke, he slowly removed the cork and filled the glasses without spilling a drop.
    â€˜So to cut a long story short, he came here once, it’s some time ago now. I expect you know that the Saint-Hilaires are a very old family, and at the moment I’m the last offshoot of the family tree. In fact it’s a miracle
that I’m not a clerk in some office in Paris or further afield. If I hadn’t inherited money from a cousin who made his fortune in Asia … but never mind, I was going to tell you that my name features in all the yearbooks of the aristocracy. My father, some forty years
ago, was noted for his legitimist opinions … but so far as I myself am concerned, well, you know!’
    He smiled, drank his sparkling wine, clicking his tongue in a distinctly democratic way and waited for Maigret to empty his own glass before refilling it.
    â€˜So this Monsieur Clément, whom I don’t know from Adam or Eve, came looking for me, got me to read his references from Royal Highnesses in France and elsewhere and then gave me to understand that he was, so to speak, the official
representative of the legitimist movement in France. I let him go on talking, and he took his chance to get what he wanted: he was asking me for 2,000 francs for the propaganda fund. And when I said no, he carried on about – oh, some ancient family or other reduced to penury, and a
subscription that had been opened for it … We began at 2,000 francs, and haggled the sum down to a hundred. In the end I gave him fifty.’
    â€˜How long ago was this?’
    â€˜Oh, several months. I can’t say exactly. It was in the hunting season. The beaters were at work in the grounds of one of the local chateaux here almost every day. I heard about that fellow everywhere and I felt sure he was a
specialist in that kind of swindle. But I wasn’t