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in the
     inn. Maigret held the missal in his hands.
    â€˜Thank you.’
    He was in a hurry to examine it. He
     walked to the back of the room.
    â€˜Inspector, sir …’
    The woman was calling to him. She was
     puzzled.
    â€˜I was told there was a reward …
     Not because Ernest …’
    Maigret held out twenty francs, which
     she put carefully in her purse, before dragging her son towards the door, saying
     crossly, ‘As for you, you young delinquent, just you wait till I get you home
      …’
    Maigret’s eye met the boy’s.
     The glance lasted a matter of seconds. But they both knew that they were
     friends.
    Perhaps because Maigret himself had once
     wanted – without ever owning one! – a gilt-edged missal, containing not only the
     ordinary of the mass but all the liturgical texts in two columns, in Latin and
     French.
    â€˜What time will you be back for
     lunch?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    Maigret was about to go to his room to
     examine the missal, but when he remembered the draughts from the roof he chose
     instead to take the main road.
    It was as he walked slowly towards the
     chateau that he opened the bound book with the Saint-Fiacre coat of arms. Or rather
     he didn’t open it. The missal opened all by itself, at a page where a piece of
     paper had been slipped between two pages.
    Page 221: ‘Prayer after
     communion.’
    The piece of paper was a roughly cut
     scrap of newspaper which, at first glance, looked odd, as if it had been badly
     printed.
Paris, 1 November. A dramatic
     suicide occurred this morning in a flat on Rue de Miromesnil occupied for
     several years by the Count of Saint-Fiacre and his Russian girlfriend, a certain
     Marie V …
    After informing his girlfriend
     that he was ashamed of the scandal provoked by a member of the family, the count
     fired a bullet into his head from a Browning and died a few minutes later
     without regaining consciousness.
    We have reason to believe that
     this was a particularly painful family drama, and that the person in question is
     none other than the mother of the unfortunate man.
    A goose that had wandered into the path
     furiously stretched its gaping beak towards Maigret. Bells rang, and the crowd
     shuffled slowly out of the little church
accompanied by the smells of incense and snuffed
     candles.
    Maigret had shoved the missal into his
     pocket, making it bulge, and had stopped to examine the terrible piece of paper.
    The crime weapon! A newspaper cutting,
     seven centimetres by five!
    The Countess of Saint-Fiacre went to
     first mass, knelt down in the pew reserved for the members of her family for two
     centuries.
    She took communion. It was planned. She
     opened her missal to read the ‘prayer after communion’.
    There was the weapon! And Maigret turned
     the bit of paper in all directions. He found something not quite right about it. He
     looked among other things at the alignment of the letters, and was convinced that it
     had not been produced by a rotary press as a real newspaper would have been.
    It was a simple galley, hand-printed.
     And in fact the sheet bore exactly the same text on the other side.
    The murderer hadn’t taken the
     trouble to refine it, or perhaps he hadn’t had time. Would it have occurred to
     the countess to turn the page over? Would she not have died first, from shock,
     indignation, shame or anguish?
    There was a frightening expression on
     Maigret’s face: because he had never before seen a crime at once so cowardly
     and so skilful.
    And whoever had committed the crime had
     also called the police!
    Assuming that the missal wouldn’t
     have been found …
    Yes! That was it! No one was supposed to
     find the missal! In which case it would have been impossible to speak of a crime, to
     accuse anyone at all! The countess had died of a sudden heart attack!
    He suddenly turned on his heel. He
     reached