The Day of the Jackal

10

AN HOUR LATER Claude Lebel emerged from the conference room dazed and bewildered. For fifty minutes he had listened as the Minister of the Interior had briefed him on the task that lay ahead.

On entering the room he had been bidden to sit at the end of the table, sandwiched between the head of the CRS and his own chief, Bouvier. In silence from the other fourteen men he had read the Rolland report, while aware that curious eyes were assessing him from all sides.

When he put the report down the worry had started inside him. Why call him? Then the Minister started to speak. It was neither a consultation nor a request. It was a directive, followed by a copious briefing. He would set up his own office; he would have unlimited access to all necessary information; the entire resources of the organisations headed by the men seated round the table would be at his disposal. There were to be no limits to the costs incurred.

Several times the need for absolute secrecy, the imperative of the Head of State himself, had been impressed on him. While he listened his heart sank. They were asking—no, demanding—the impossible. He had nothing to go on. There was no crime—yet. There were no clues. There were no witnesses, except three whom he could not talk to. Just a name, a code-name, and the whole world to search in.

Claude Lebel was, as he knew, a good cop. He had always been a good cop, slow, precise methodical, painstaking. Just occasionally he had shown the flash of inspiration that is needed to turn a good cop into a remarkable detective. But he had never lost sight of the fact that in police work ninety-nine per cent of the effort is routine, unspectacular enquiry, checking and double-checking, laboriously building up a web of parts until the parts become a whole, the whole becomes a net, and the net finally encloses the criminal with a case that will not just make headlines but stand up in court.

He was known in the PJ as a bit of a plodder, a methodical man who hated publicity and had never given the sort of press conferences on which some of his colleagues had built their reputations. And yet he had gone steadily up the ladder, solving his cases, seeing his criminals convicted. When a vacancy had occurred at the head of the Homicide Division of the Brigade Criminelle three years ago, even the others in line for the job had agreed it was fair that Lebel should have got the job. He had a good steady record with Homicide and in three years had never failed to procure an arrest, although once the accused was acquitted on a technicality.

As head of Homicide he had come more closely to the notice of Maurice Bouvier, chief of the whole Brigade, and another old-style cop. So when Dupuy had died suddenly a few weeks back it was Bouvier who had asked that Lebel become his new deputy. There were some in the PJ who suspected that Bouvier, bogged down for a lot of the time with administrative details, appreciated a retiring subordinate who could handle the big, headline-making cases quietly, without stealing his superior’s thunder. But perhaps they were just being uncharitable.

After the meeting at the Ministry the copies of the Rolland report were gathered up for storage in the Minister’s safe. Lebel alone was allowed to keep Bouvier’s copy. His only request had been that he be allowed to seek the co-operation, in confidence, of the heads of some of the criminal investigation forces of the major countries likely to have the identity of a professional assassin like the Jackal on their files. Without such co-operation, he pointed out, it would be impossible even to start looking.

Sanguinetti had asked if such men could be relied on to keep their mouths shut. Lebel had replied that he knew personally the men he needed to contact, that his enquiries would not be official but would be along the personal-contact basis that exists between most of the Western World’s top policemen. After some reflection the Minister had granted the request.

And now he stood in the hall waiting for Bouvier, and watching the chiefs of department file past him on their way out. Some nodded curtly and passed on; others ventured a sympathetic smile as they said good night. Almost the last to leave, while inside the conference room Bouvier conferred quietly with Max Fernet, was the aristocratic Colonel from the Elysée staff. Lebel had briefly caught his name, as the men round the table were introduced, as Saint-Clair de Villauban. He stopped in front of the small and roly-poly commissaire and eyed him with ill-concealed distaste.

‘I hope, Commissaire, that you will be successful in your enquiries, and rapidly so,’ he said. ‘We at the palace will be keeping a very close eye on your progress. In the event that you should fail to find this bandit, I can assure you that there will be … repercussions.’

He turned on his heel and stalked down the stairs towards the foyer. Lebel said nothing but blinked rapidly several times.

One of the factors in the make-up of Claude Lebel that had led to his successes when enquiring into crime over the previous twenty years since he had joined the police force of the Fourth Republic as a young detective in Normandy was his capacity to inspire people with the confidence to talk to him.

He lacked the imposing bulk of Bouvier, the traditional image of the authority of the law. Nor did he have the smartness with words that exemplified so many of the new breed of young detectives now coming into the force, who could bully and browbeat a witness into tears. He did not feel the lack.

He was aware that most crime in any society is either carried out against, or witnessed by, the little people, the shopkeeper, the sales assistant, the postman or the bank clerk. These people he could make talk to him, and he knew it.

It was partly because of his size; he was small, and resembled in many ways the cartoonist’s image of a hen-pecked husband, which, although no one in the department knew it, was just what he was.

His dress was dowdy, a crumpled suit and a mackintosh. His manner was mild, almost apologetic, and in his request of a witness for information it contrasted so sharply with the attitude the witness had experienced from his first interview with the law, that the witness tended to warm towards the detective as to a refuge from the roughness of the subordinates.

But there was something more. He had been head of the Homicide Division of the most powerful criminal police force in Europe. He had been ten years a detective with the Brigade Criminelle of the renowned Police Judiciaire of France. Behind the mildness and the seeming simplicity was a combination of shrewd brain and a dogged refusal to be ruffled or intimidated by anyone when he was carrying out a job. He had been threatened by some of the most vicious gang bosses of France, who had thought from the rapid blinking with which Lebel greeted such approaches that their warnings had been duly taken. Only later, from a prison cell, had they had the leisure to realise they had underestimated the soft brown eyes and the toothbrush moustache.

Twice he had been subjected to intimidation by wealthy and powerful figures, once when an industrialist had wished to see one of his junior employees charged with embezzlement on the basis of a cursory glance at the auditor’s evidence, and once when a society blade had wished investigations into the death by drugs of a young actress to be dropped.

In the first case the enquiry into the affairs of the industrialist had resulted in certain other and far bigger discrepancies being unearthed which had nothing to do with the junior accountant, but which had caused the industrialist to wish he had departed for Switzerland while he had the chance. The second time the society host had ended up with a lengthy period as a guest of the state in which to regret he had ever bothered to head a vice ring from his Avenue Victor Hugo penthouse.

Claude Lebel’s reaction to the remarks of Colonel Saint-Clair was to blink like a rebuked schoolboy and say nothing. But it did not subsequently in any way affect his conduct of the job with which he had been saddled.

As the last man filed out of the conference room Maurice Bouvier joined him. Max Fernet wished him luck, shook hands briefly and headed down the stairs. Bouvier clapped a ham-like hand on Lebel’s shoulder.

‘Eh, Men, mon petit Claude. So that’s the way it is, hein? All right, it was me who suggested the PJ handle this business. It was the only thing to do. Those others would have talked round in circles for ever. Come, we’ll talk in the car.’ He led the way downstairs and the pair of them climbed into the back of the Citroën that waited in the courtyard.

It was past nine o’clock and a dark-purple weal lying over Neuilly was all that remained of the day. Bouvier’s car swept down the Avenue de Marigny and over the Place Clemenceau. Lebel glanced out to the right and up the brilliant river of the Champs Elysées, whose grandeur on a summer night never ceased to surprise and excite him, despite the ten years that had passed since he came up from the provinces.

Bouvier spoke at last.

‘You’ll have to drop whatever you are doing. Everything. Clear the desk completely. I’ll assign Favier and Malcoste to take over your outstanding cases. Do you want a new office for this job?’

‘No, I prefer to stick to my present one.’

‘OK, fine, but from now on it becomes headquarters of Operation find-the-Jackal. Nothing else. Right? Is there anyone you want to help you?’

‘Yes. Caron,’ said Lebel, referring to one of the younger inspectors who had worked with him in Homicide and whom he had brought to his new job as assistant chief of the Brigade Criminelle.

‘OK, you have Caron. Anyone else?’

‘No thank you. But Caron will have to know.’

Bouvier thought for a few moments.

‘It should be all right. They can’t expect miracles. Obviously you must have an assistant. But don’t tell him for an hour or two. I’ll ring Frey when I get to the office and ask for formal clearance. Nobody else has to know, though. It would be in the Press inside two days if it got out.’

‘Nobody else, just Caron,’ said Lebel.

‘Bon. There’s one last thing. Before I left the meeting Sanguinetti suggested the whole group who were there tonight be kept informed at regular intervals of progress and developments. Frey agreed. Fernet and I tried to head it off, but we lost. There’s to be a briefing by you every evening at the Ministry from now on. Ten o’clock sharp.’

‘Oh God,’ said Lebel.

‘In theory,’ continued Bouvier with heavy irony, ‘we shall all be available to offer our best advice and suggestions. Don’t worry, Claude, Fernet and I will be there too, in case the wolves start snapping.’

‘This is until further notice?’ asked Lebel.

‘ ’Fraid so. The bugger of it is, there’s no time schedule for this operation. You’ve just got to find this assassin before he gets to Big Charles. We don’t know whether the man himself has a timetable, or what it could be. It might be for a hit tomorrow morning, maybe not for a month yet. You have to assume you are working flat out until he has been caught, or at least identified and located. From then on I think the Action Service boys can take care of things.’

‘Bunch of thugs,’ murmured Lebel.

‘Granted,’ said Bouvier easily, ‘but they have their uses. We live in hair-raising times, my dear Claude. Added to a vast increase in normal crime, we now have political crime. There are some things that just have to be done. They do them. Anyway, just try and find this blighter, huh.’

The car swept into the Quai des Orfèvres and turned through the gates of the PJ. Ten minutes later Claude Lebel was back in his office. He walked to the window, opened it and leant out, gazing across the river towards the Quai des Grands Augustins on the Left Bank in front of him. Although separated by a narrow strip of the Seine where it flowed round the Île de la Cité, he was close enough to see the diners in the pavement restaurants dotted along the quay and hear the laughter and the clink of bottles on glasses of wine.

Had he been a different kind of man it might have occurred to him to realise that the powers conferred on him in the last ninety minutes had made him, for a spell at least, the most powerful cop in Europe: that nobody short of the President or the Interior Minister could veto his request for facilities; that he could almost mobilise the Army, provided it could be done secretly. It might also have occurred to him that exalted though his powers were they were dependent upon success; that with success he could crown his career with honours, but that in failure he could be broken as Saint-Clair de Villauban had obliquely indicated.

But because he was what he was, he thought of none of these things. He was puzzling as to how he would explain over the phone to Amélie that he was not coming home until further notice. There was a knock on the door.

Inspectors Malcoste and Favier came in to collect the dossiers of the four cases on which Lebel had been working when he had been called away earlier that evening. He spent half an hour briefing Malcoste on the two cases he was assigning to him, and Favier on the other two.

When they had gone he sighed heavily. There was a knock on the door. It was Lucien Caron.

‘I just got a call from Commissaire Bouvier’s office,’ he began. ‘He told me to report to you.’

‘Quite right. Until further notice I have been taken off all routine duties and given a rather special job. You’ve been assigned to be my assistant.’

He did not bother to flatter Caron by revealing that he had asked for the young inspector to be his right-hand man. The desk phone rang, he picked it up and listened briefly.

‘Right,’ he resumed, ‘that was Bouvier to say you have been given security clearance to be told what it is all about. For a start you had better read this.’

While Caron sat on the chair in front of the desk and read the Rolland file, Lebel cleared all the remaining folders and notes off his desk and stacked them on the untidy shelves behind him. The office hardly looked like the nerve centre of the biggest manhunt in France. Police offices never do look much. Lebel’s was no exception.

It was no more than twelve feet by fourteen, with two windows on the south face looking out over the river towards the lively honeycomb of the Latin Quarter clustering round the Boulevard St Michel. Through one of the windows the sounds of the night and the warm summer air drifted in. The office contained two desks, one for Lebel, which stood with its back to the window, another for a secretary, which stood along the east wall. The door was opposite the window.

Apart from the two desks and two chairs behind them, there was one other upright chair, an armchair next to the door, six large grey filing cabinets standing along almost the whole of the west wall and whose combined tops supported an array of reference and law books, and one set of bookshelves, situated between the windows and stuffed with almanacs and files.

Of signs of home there was only the framed photograph on Lebel’s desk of an ample and determined-looking lady who was Madame Amélie Lebel, and two children, a plain girl with steel-rimmed glasses and pigtails, and a youth with an expression as mild and put-upon as his father.

Caron finished reading and looked up.

‘Merde,’ he said.

‘As you say, une énorme merde,’ replied Lebel, who seldom permitted himself the use of strong language. Most of the top commissaires of the PJ were known to their immediate staff by nicknames like le Patron or le Vieux, but Claude Lebel, perhaps because he never drank more than a small aperitif, did not smoke or swear, and reminded younger detectives inevitably of one of their former schoolteachers, was known within Homicide and more lately in the corridors of the Brigade chief’s administrative floor as le Professeur. Had he not been such a good thief-taker, he would have become something of a figure of fun.

‘Nevertheless,’ continued Lebel, ‘listen while I fill you in on the details. It will be the last occasion I shall have time.’

For thirty minutes he briefed Caron on the events of the afternoon, from Roger Frey’s meeting with the President to the meeting in the ministry conference room, to his own brusque summons on the recommendation of Maurice Bouvier, to the final setting up of the office in which they now sat as the headquarters of the manhunt for the Jackal. Caron listened in silence.

‘Blimey,’ he said at last when Lebel had finished, ‘they have lumbered you.’ He thought for a moment, then looked up at his chief with worry and concern. ‘Mon commissaire, you know they have given you this because no one else wants it? You know what they will do to you if you fail to catch this man in time?’

Lebel nodded with a tinge of sadness.

‘Yes, Lucien, I know. There’s nothing I can do. I’ve been given the job. So from now we just have to do it.’

‘But where on earth do we start?’

‘We start by recognising that we have the widest powers ever granted to two cops in France,’ replied Lebel cheerfully, ‘so, we use them.

‘To start with, get installed behind that desk. Take a pad and note the following. Get my normal secretary transferred or given paid leave until further notice. No one else can be let into the secret. You become my assistant and secretary rolled into one. Get a camp bed in here from emergency stores, linen and pillows, washing and shaving tackle. Get a percolator of coffee, some milk and sugar brought from the canteen and installed. We’re going to need a lot of coffee.

‘Get on to the switchboard and instruct them to leave ten outside lines and one operator permanently at the disposal of this office. If they quibble, refer them to Bouvier personally. As for any other requests from me for facilities, get straight on to the department chief and quote my name. Fortunately this office now gets top priority from every other ancillary service—by order. Prepare a circular memorandum, copy to every department chief who attended this evening’s meeting, ready for my signature, announcing that you are now my sole assistant and empowered to require from them anything that I would ask them for personally if I were not engaged. Got it?’

Caron finished writing and looked up.

‘Got it, chief. I can do that throughout the night. Which is the top priority?’

‘The telephone switchboard. I want a good man on that, the best they’ve got. Get on to Chief of Admin at his home, and again quote Bouvier for authority.’

‘Right. What do we want from them first?’

‘I want, as soon as they can get it, a direct link personally to the head of the Homicide Division of the criminal police of seven countries. Fortunately, I know most of them personally from past meetings of Interpol. In some cases I know the Deputy Chief. If you can’t get one, get the other.

‘The countries are: United States, that means the Office of Domestic Intelligence in Washington. Britain, Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Scotland Yard. Belgium. Holland. Italy. West Germany. South Africa. Get them at home or in the office.

‘When you get each of them one by one, arrange a series of telephone calls from Interpol Communications Room between me and them between seven and ten in the morning at twenty-minute intervals. Get on to Interpol Communications and book the calls as each Homicide chief at the other end agrees to be in his own communications room at the appointed time. The calls should be person-to-person on the UHF frequency and there is to be no listening in. Impress on each of them that what I have to say is for their ears only and of top priority not only for France but possibly for their own country. Prepare me a list by six in the morning of the schedule of the seven calls that have been booked, in order of sequence.

‘In the meantime, I am going down to Homicide to see if a foreign killer has ever been suspected of operating in France and not been picked up. I confess, nothing in that line comes to mind, and in any case I suspect Rodin would have been more careful on his selection than that. Now, do you know what to do?’

Caron, looking slightly dazed, glanced up from his several pages of scribbled notes.

‘Yes, chief, I’ve got it. Bon, I’d better get to work.’ He reached out for the telephone.

Claude Lebel passed out of the office and headed for the stairs. As he did so the clock of Notre Dame further down the island chimed midnight, and the world passed into the morning of August 12th.

11

COLONEL RAOUL SAINT-CLAIR DE VILLAUBAN ARRIVED HOME just before midnight. He had spent the previous three hours meticulously typing his report on the evening’s meeting in the Interior Ministry, which would be on the desk of the Secretary-General of the Elysée first thing in the morning.

He had taken particular pains over the report, tearing up two rough copies before he was satisfied, then carefully typing out the third into a fair copy by himself. It was irritating to have to engage in the menial task of typing, and he was not used to it, but it had the advantage of keeping the secret from any secretary, a fact that he had not hesitated to point out in the body of the report, and also of enabling him to have the document ready for production first thing in the morning, which he hoped would not go unnoticed. With luck the report would be on the President’s desk an hour after being read by the Secretary-General, and this also would do him no harm.

He had used extra care in selecting just the right phraseology to give a slight hint of the writer’s disapproval of putting a matter so important as the security of the head of state into the sole hands of a commissaire of police, a man more accustomed by training and experience to uncovering petty criminals of little brains or talent.

It would not have done to go too far, for Lebel might even find his man. But in the event that he did not, it was as well that there was someone sufficiently on his toes to have had doubts about the wisdom of the choice of Lebel at the time.

Moreover, he had certainly not taken to Lebel. A common little man had been his private judgement. ‘Possessed no doubt of a competent record’ had been his phrasing in the report.

Musing over the first two copies he had written in longhand, he had come to the conclusion that the most advantageous position for him to take would be not to oppose outright the appointment of this promoted constable at the outset, since the appointment had been agreed by the meeting as a whole, and if he opposed the selection he would be asked for specific reasons; but, on the other hand, to keep a close watch on the whole operation, on behalf of the presidential secretariat, and to be the first to point out, with due sobriety, the inefficiencies in the conduct of the investigation as and when they occurred.

His musings on how he could best keep track of what Lebel was up to were interrupted by a telephone call from Sanguinetti to inform him that the Minister had made a last-minute decision to preside over nightly meetings at ten each evening to hear a progress report from Lebel. The news had delighted Saint-Clair. It solved his problem for him. With a little background homework during the daytime, he would be able to put forceful and pertinent questions to the detective, and reveal to the others that at least in the presidential secretariat they were keeping wide awake to the gravity and urgency of the situation.

Privately he did not put the assassin’s chances very high, even if there were an assassin in the offing. The presidential security screen was the most efficient in the world, and part of his job in the secretariat was to devise the organisation of the President’s public appearances and the routes he would follow. He had few qualms that this intensive and highly planned security screen could be penetrated by some foreign gunman.

He let himself in by the front door of his flat and heard his newly installed mistress call him from the bedroom.

‘Is that you, darling?’

‘Yes, cherie. Of course it’s me. Have you been lonely?’

She came running through from the bedroom, dressed in a filmy black baby-doll nightie, trimmed at throat and hem with lace. The indirect light from the bedside lamp, shining through the open door of the bedroom, silhouetted the curves of her young woman’s body. As usual when he saw his mistress, Raoul Saint-Clair felt a thrill of satisfaction that she was his, and so deeply in love with him. His character, however, was to congratulate himself for the fact, rather than any fortunate providence that might have brought them together.

She threw her bare arms round his neck and gave him a long open-mouthed kiss. He responded as best he could while still clutching his briefcase and the evening paper.

‘Come,’ he said when they separated, ‘get into bed and I’ll join you.’ He gave her a slap on the bottom to speed her on her way. The girl skipped back into the bedroom, threw herself on the bed and spread out her limbs, hands crossed behind her neck, breasts upthrust.

Saint-Clair entered the room without his briefcase and glanced at her with satisfaction. She grinned back lasciviously.

During their fortnight together she had learned that only the most blatant suggestiveness coupled with an assumption of crude carnality could produce any lust from the juiceless loins of the career courtier. Privately Jacqueline hated him as much as on the first day they had met, but she had learned that what he lacked in virility he could be made to make up in loquacity, particularly about his importance in the scheme of things at the Elysée Palace.

‘Hurry,’ she whispered, ‘I want you.’

Saint-Clair smiled with genuine pleasure and took off his shoes, laying them side by side at the foot of the dumb waiter. The jacket followed, its pockets carefully emptied on to the dressing-table top. The trousers came next, to be meticulously folded and laid over the protruding arm of the dumb waiter. His long thin legs protruded from beneath the shirt-tails like whiskery white knitting needles.

‘What kept you so long?’ asked Jacqueline. ‘I’ve been waiting for ages.’

Saint-Clair shook his head sombrely.

‘Certainly nothing that you should bother your head with, my dear.’

‘Oh, you’re mean.’ She turned over abruptly on to her side in a mock-sulk facing away from him, knees bent. His fingers slipped on the tie-knot as he looked across the room at the chestnut hair tumbling over the shoulders and the full hips now uncovered by the shortie nightdress. Another five minutes and he was ready for bed, buttoning the monogrammed silk pyjamas.

He stretched his length on the bed next to her and ran his hand down the dip of the waist and up to the summit of her hip, the fingers slipping down towards the sheet and round the swell of the warm buttock.

‘What’s the matter, then?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I thought you wanted to make love.’

‘You just don’t give me any explanation. I can’t ring you at the office. I’ve been lying here for hours worrying that something might have happened to you. You’ve never been this late before without ringing me.’

She rolled over on to her back and looked up at him. Propped on his elbow he slipped his free hand under the nightie and started to knead one of her breasts.

‘Look, darling, I’ve been very busy. There was something of a crisis, something I had to sort out before I could get away. I’d have rung but there were people still working, popping in and out of the office the whole time. Several of them know my wife is away. It would have seemed odd for me to ring home through the switchboard.’

She slipped a hand through his pyjama fly to encircle the limp penis, and was rewarded with a light tremor.

‘There couldn’t have been anything so big you couldn’t have let me know you’d be late, darling. I was worrying all night.’

‘Well, there’s no need to worry any more. Go down on me, you know I like that.’

She laughed, reached up with her other hand to pull his head down and bit him on the ear-lobe.

‘No, he doesn’t deserve it. Not yet anyway.’ She squeezed the slowly hardening prick in rebuke. The Colonel’s breathing was noticeably shallower. He started kissing her open-mouthed, his hand kneading first one and then the other nipple so hard that she wriggled.

‘Go down on me,’ he growled.

She shifted slightly and undid the pyjama cord. Raoul Saint-Clair watched the mane of brown hair fall forward from her head to shroud his belly, lay back and sighed with pleasure.

‘It seems the OAS are still after the President,’ he said. ‘The plot was discovered this afternoon. It’s being taken care of. That’s what kept me.’

There was a soft ‘plop’ as the girl withdrew her head a few inches.

‘Don’t be silly, darling, they were finished long ago.’ She went back to her task.

‘They’re bloody well not. Now they’ve hired a foreign assassin to try to kill him. Aeegh, don’t bite.’

Half an hour later Colonel Raoul Saint-Clair de Villauban lay asleep, face half-buried in the pillow, snoring gently from his exertions. Beside him his mistress lay staring up through the darkness at the ceiling, dimly lit where the lights from the street outside filtered through a tiny crack where the curtains joined.

What she had learned had left her aghast. Although she had had no previous knowledge of any such plot she could work out for herself the importance of Kowalski’s confession.

She waited in silence until the bedside clock with the luminous dial registered two in the morning. Easing herself out of the bed, she slid the plug of the bedroom telephone extension out of its socket.

Before walking to the door she bent over the Colonel, and was grateful he was not the sort of man who liked to sleep in embrace with his bedmate. He was still snoring.

Outside the bedroom she quietly closed the door, crossed the sitting room towards the hall and closed that door after her. From the phone on the hall table she dialled a Molitor number. There was a wait of several minutes until a sleepy voice answered. She spoke rapidly for two minutes, received an acknowledgement and hung up. A minute later she was back in bed, trying to get to sleep.

Throughout the night crime chiefs of the police forces of five European countries, America and South Africa were being woken with long-distance calls from Paris. Most of them were irritated and sleepy. In Western Europe the time was the same as Paris, the small hours of the morning. In Washington the time was nine in the evening when the call from Paris came through, and the chief of FBI Homicide was at a dinner party. It was only at the third attempt that Caron could get him, and then their conversation was marred by the chatter of guests and the clink of glasses from the next room where the party was in progress. But he got the message and agreed to be in the communications room of the FBI headquarters at two in the morning, Washington time, to take a call from Commissaire Lebel who would be ringing him from Interpol at 8 am Paris time.

The crime chiefs of the Belgian, Italian, German and Dutch police were all apparently good family men; each was awoken in turn and after listening to Caron for a few minutes agreed to be in their communications rooms at the times Caron suggested to take a person-to-person call from Lebel on a matter of great urgency.

Van Ruys of South Africa was out of town and would not be able to get back to headquarters by sunrise, so Caron spoke to Anderson, his deputy. Lebel, when he heard, was not displeased for he knew Anderson fairly well, but Van Ruys not at all. Besides, he suspected Van Ruys was more of a political appointment while Anderson had once been a constable on the beat like himself.

The call reached Mr Anthony Mallinson, Assistant Commissioner Crime for Scotland Yard, in his home at Bexley shortly before four. He growled in protest at the insistent clanging of the bell beside his bed, reached out for the mouthpiece and muttered ‘Mallinson’.

‘Mr Anthony Mallinson?’ asked a voice.

‘Speaking.’ He shrugged to clear the bedclothes from his shoulders, and glanced at his watch.

‘My name is Inspector Lucien Caron, of the French Sûreté Nationale. I am ringing on behalf of Commissaire Claude Lebel.’

The voice, speaking good but strongly accented English, was coming over clearly. Obviously line traffic at that hour was light. Mallinson frowned. Why couldn’t the blighters call at a civilised hour?

‘Yes.’

‘I believe you know Commissaire Lebel, perhaps, Mr Mallinson.’

Mallinson thought for a moment. Lebel? Oh, yes, little fellow, had been head of Homicide in the PJ. Didn’t look much but he got results. Been damn helpful over that murdered English tourist two years back. Could have been nasty in the Press if they hadn’t caught the killer in double-quick time.

‘Yes, I know Commissaire Lebel,’ he said down the phone. ‘What’s it about?’

Beside him his wife Lily, disturbed by the talking, grumbled in her sleep.

‘There is a matter of very considerable urgency, which also requires a great degree of discretion, that has cropped up. I am assisting Commissaire Lebel on the case. It is a most unusual case. The Commissaire would like to place a person-to-person call to you in your communications room at the Yard this morning at nine o’clock. Could you please be present to take the call?’

Mallinson thought for a moment.

‘Is this a routine enquiry between co-operating police forces?’ he asked. If it were they could use the routine Interpol network. Nine o’clock was a busy time at the Yard.

‘No, Mr Mallinson, it is not. It is a question of a personal request by the Commissaire to you for a little discreet assistance. It may be there is nothing that affects Scotland Yard in the matter that has come up. Most probably so. If that is the case, it would be better if there were no formal request placed.’

Mallinson thought it over. He was by nature a cautious man and had no wish to be involved in clandestine enquiries from a foreign police force. If a crime had been committed, or a criminal had fled to Britain, that was another matter. In that case why the secrecy? Then he remembered a case years ago where he had been sent out to find and bring back the daughter of a Cabinet Minister who had gone astray with a handsome young devil. The girl had been a minor, so charges of removing the child from parental authority could have been brought. A bit marginal. But the Minister had wanted the whole thing done without a murmur reaching the Press. The Italian police had been very helpful when the couple was found at Verona playing Romeo and Juliet. All right, so Lebel wanted a bit of help on the Old Boy network. That was what Old Boy networks were for.

‘All right, I’ll take the call. Nine o’clock.’

‘Thank you so much, Mr Mallinson.’

‘Good night.’ Mallinson replaced the receiver, re-set the alarm clock for six-thirty instead of seven, and went back to sleep.

In a small and fusty bachelor flat, while Paris slept towards the dawn, a middle-aged schoolmaster paced up and down the floor of the cramped bedsitter. The scene around him was chaotic: books, newspapers, magazines and manuscripts lay scattered over the table, chairs and sofa, and even on the coverlet of the narrow bed set into its alcove on the far side of the room. In another alcove a sink overflowed with unwashed crockery.

What obsessed his thoughts in his nocturnal pacings was not the untidy state of his room, for since his removal from his post as headmaster of a Lycée at Sidi-bel-Abbes and the loss of the fine house with two manservants that went with it, he had learned to live as he now did. His problem lay elsewhere.

As dawn was breaking over the eastern suburbs, he sat down finally and picked up one of the papers. His eye ran yet again down the second lead story on the foreign news page. It was headlined: ‘OAS Chiefs Holed Up in Rome Hotel.’ After reading it for the last time he made up his mind, threw on a light mackintosh against the chill of the morning, and left the flat.

He caught a cruising taxi on the nearest boulevard and ordered the driver to take him to the Gare du Nord. Although the taxi dropped him in the forecourt, he walked away from the station as soon as the taxi had left, crossed the road and entered one of the all-night cafés of the area.

He ordered a coffee and a metal disc for the telephone, left the coffee on the counter and went into the back of the café to dial. Directory Enquiries put him on to the International Exchange and he asked them the number of a hotel in Rome. He got it within sixty seconds, replaced the receiver and left.

At a café a hundred metres down the street he again used the phone, this time to ask Enquiries for the location of the nearest all-night post office from which international calls could be placed. He was told, as he had expected, that there was one round the corner from the mainline station.

At the post office he placed a call to the Rome number he had been given, without naming the hotel represented by the number, and spent an anxious twenty minutes waiting until it came through.

‘I wish to speak to Signor Poitiers,’ he told the Italian voice that answered.

‘Signor Che?’ asked the voice.

‘Il Signor francesi. Poitiers. Poitiers… .’

‘Che?’ repeated the voice.

‘Francesi, francesi …’ said the man in Paris.

‘Ah, si, il signor francesi. Momento, per favore …’

There was a series of clicks, then a tired voice answered in French.

‘Ouay …’

‘Listen,’ said the man in Paris urgently. ‘I don’t have much time. Take a pencil and note what I say. Begins. “Valmy to Poitiers. The Jackal is blown. Repeat. The Jackal is blown. Kowalski was taken. Sang before dying. Ends.” Got that?’

‘Ouay,’ said the voice. ‘I’ll pass it on.’

Valmy replaced the receiver, hurriedly paid his bill and scurried out of the building. In a minute he was lost in the crowds of commuters streaming out of the main hall of the station. The sun was over the horizon, warming the pavements and the chill night air. Within half an hour the smell of morning and croissants and grinding coffee would vanish beneath the pall of exhaust fumes, body odour and stale tobacco. Two minutes after Valmy had disappeared a car drew up outside the post office and two men from the DST hurried inside. They took a description from the switchboard operator, but it could have described anybody.

In Rome Marc Rodin was awakened at 7.55 when the man who had spent the night on the duty desk on the floor below shook him by the shoulder. He was awake in an instant, half out of bed, hand groping for the gun under his pillow. He relaxed and grunted when he saw the face of the ex-legionnaire above him. A glance at the bedside table told him he had overslept anyway. After years in the tropics his habitual waking hour was much earlier, and the August sun of Rome was already high above the roofs. But weeks of inactivity, passing the evening hours playing piquet with Montclair and Casson, drinking too much rough red wine, taking no exercise worth the name, all had combined to make him slack and sleepy.

‘A message, mon colonel. Someone phoned just now, seemed in a hurry.’

The legionnaire proffered a sheet from a note pad on which were scribbled the disjointed phrases of Valmy. Rodin read through the message once, then leapt out of the thinly sheeted bed. He wrapped the cotton sarong he habitually wore, a habit from the East, round his waist, and read the message again.

‘All right. Dismiss.’ The legionnaire left the room and went back downstairs.

Rodin swore silently and intensely for several seconds, crumpling the piece of paper in his hands. Damn, damn, damn, damn Kowalski.

For the first two days after Kowalski’s disappearance he had thought the man had simply deserted. There had been several defections of late from the cause, as the conviction set in among the rank and file that the OAS had failed and would fail in its aim of killing Charles de Gaulle and bringing down the present Government of France. But Kowalski he had always thought would remain loyal to the last.

And here was evidence that he had for some inexplicable reason returned to France, or perhaps been picked up inside Italy and abducted. Now it seemed he had talked, under pressure of course.

Rodin genuinely grieved his dead servitor. Part of the considerable reputation he had built up as a fighting soldier and commanding officer had been based on the enormous concern he showed for his men. These things are appreciated by fighting soldiers more than any military theorist can ever imagine. Now Kowalski was dead, and Rodin had few illusions of the manner of his passing.

Still, the important thing was to try to recollect just what Kowalski had had to tell. The meeting in Vienna, the name of the hotel. Of course, all of that. The three men who had been at the meeting. This would be no news to the SDECE. But what did he know about the Jackal? He had not been listening at the door, that was certain. He could tell them of a tall blond foreigner who had visited the three of them. That in itself meant nothing. Such a foreigner could have been an arms dealer, or a financial backer. There had been no names mentioned.

But Valmy’s message mentioned the Jackal by his code-name. How? How could Kowalski have told them that?

With a start of horror Rodin recalled the scene as they had parted. He had stood in the doorway with the Englishman; Viktor had been a few feet down the corridor, annoyed at the way the Englishman had spotted him in the alcove, a professional outmanoeuvred by another professional, waiting for trouble, almost hoping for it. What had he, Rodin said? ‘Bonsoir, Mr Jackal.’ Of course, damn and blast it.

Thinking things over again, Rodin realised that Kowalski could never have got the killer’s real name. Only he, Montclair and Casson knew that. All the same, Valmy was right. With Kowalski’s confession in the hands of the SDECE, it was too far blown to be retrievable. They had the meeting, the hotel, probably they had already talked to the desk clerk; they had the face and figure of a man, a code-name. There could be no doubt they would guess what Kowalski had guessed—that the blond was a killer. From then on the net around De Gaulle would tighten; he would abandon all public engagements, all exits from his palace, all chances for an assassin to get him. It was over; the operation was blown. He would have to call off the Jackal, insist on the money back, minus all expenses and a retainer for the time and trouble involved.

There was one thing to be settled, and quickly. The Jackal himself must be warned urgently to halt operations. Rodin was still enough of a commanding officer not to send a man out on his orders on a mission for which success had become impossible.

He summoned the bodyguard to whom, since the departure of Kowalski, he had given the duties of going every day to the main post office to collect the mail and, if necessary, make telephone calls, and briefed him at length.

By nine o’clock the bodyguard was in the post office and asked for a telephone number in London. It took twenty minutes before the telephone at the other end began to ring. The switchboard operator gestured the Frenchman to a cabin to take the call. He picked up the receiver as the operator put hers down, and listened to the bzzz-bzzz … pause … bzzz-bzzz of an English telephone ringing.

The Jackal rose early that morning, for he had much to do. The three main suitcases he had checked and re-packed the previous evening. Only the hand-grip remained to be topped up with his sponge bag and shaving tackle. He drank his habitual two cups of coffee, washed, showered and shaved. After packing the remainder of the overnight toiletries he closed up the hand luggage and stored all four pieces by the door.

He made himself a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs, orange juice and more black coffee in the flat’s small but compact kitchen, and ate it off the kitchen table. Being a tidy and methodical man he emptied the last of the milk down the sink, broke the two remaining eggs and poured them also down the sink. The remainder of the orange juice he drank off, junked the can in the trash basket and the remainder of the bread, egg shells and coffee grounds went down the disposal unit. Nothing left would be likely to go rotten during his absence.

Finally he dressed, choosing a thin silk polo-necked sweater, the dove-grey suit containing the private papers in the name of Duggan, and the hundred pounds in cash, dark grey socks and slim black moccasin shoes. The ensemble was completed by the inevitable dark glasses.

At nine-fifteen he took his luggage, two pieces in each hand, closed the self-locking flat door behind him, and went downstairs. It was a short walk to South Audley Street and he caught a taxi on the corner.

‘London Airport, Number Two Building,’ he told the driver.

As the taxi moved away, the phone in his flat began to ring.

It was ten o’clock when the legionnaire returned to the hotel off the Via Condotti and told Rodin he had tried for thirty minutes to get a reply from the London number he had been given, but had not succeeded.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Casson, who had heard the explanation given to Rodin and seen the legionnaire dismissed to return to his guard duties. The three OAS chiefs were sitting in the drawing room of their suite. Rodin withdrew a piece of paper from his inside pocket and passed it over to Casson.

Casson read it and passed it to Montclair. Both men finally looked at their leader for an answer. There was none. Rodin sat staring out of the windows across the baking roofs of Rome, brow furrowed in thought.

‘When did it come?’ asked Casson eventually.

‘This morning,’ replied Rodin briefly.

‘You’ve got to stop him,’ protested Montclair. ‘They’ll have half France on the lookout for him.’

‘They’ll have half of France on the look-out for a tall blond foreigner,’ said Rodin quietly. ‘In August there are over one million foreigners in France. So far as we know they have no name to go on, no face, no passport. Being a professional he is probably using a false passport. They still have a long way to go to get him yet. There’s a good chance he will be forewarned if he rings Valmy, and then he’ll be able to get out again.’

‘If he rings Valmy he will, of course, be ordered to drop the operation,’ said Montclair. ‘Valmy will order him.’

Rodin shook his head.

‘Valmy does not have the authority to do that. His orders are to receive information from the girl and pass it on to the Jackal when he is telephoned. He will do that, but nothing else.’

‘But the Jackal must realise of his own accord that it is all over,’ protested Montclair. ‘He must get out of France as soon as he rings Valmy the first time.’

‘In theory yes,’ said Rodin thoughtfully. ‘If he does he hands back the money. There’s a lot at stake, for all of us, including him. It depends how confident he feels of his own planning.’

‘Do you think he has a chance now … now that this has happened?’ asked Casson.

‘Frankly, no,’ said Rodin. ‘But he is a professional. So am I, in my way. It is a frame of mind. One does not like to stand down an operation one has planned personally.’

‘Then for God’s sake recall him,’ protested Casson.

‘I can’t. I would if I could, but I can’t. He’s gone. He’s on his way. He wanted it this way and now he’s got it. We don’t know where he is or what he is going to do. He’s completely on his own. I can’t even call up Valmy and order him to instruct the Jackal to drop the whole thing. To do so would risk “blowing” Valmy. Nobody can stop the Jackal now. It’s too late.’

12

COMMISSAIRE CLAUDE LEBEL ARRIVED BACK in his office just before six in the morning to find Inspector Caron looking tired and strained, in shirt-sleeves at his desk.

He had several sheets of foolscap paper in front of him covered with handwritten notes. In the office some things had changed. On top of the filing cabinets an electric coffee percolator bubbled, sending out a delicious aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Next to it stood a pile of paper cups, a tin of unsweetened milk and a bag of sugar. These had come up from the basement canteen during the night.

In the corner between the two desks a single truckle bed had been set up, covered with a rough blanket. The waste-paper basket had been emptied and stored next to the armchair by the door.

The window was open still, a faint haze of blue smoke from Caron’s cigarettes drifting out into the cool morning. Beyond the window the first flecks of the coming day mottled the spire of St Sulpice.

Lebel crossed to his desk and slumped into the chair. Although it was only twenty four hours since he had woken from his last sleep he looked tired, like Caron.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’ve been through the lot over the past ten years. The only foreign political killer who ever tried to operate here was Degueldre, and he’s dead. Besides, he was OAS and we had him on file as such. Presumably Rodin has chosen a man who has nothing to do with the OAS, and he’s quite right. There were only four contract-hire killers who tried it in France over the past ten years—apart from the homegrown variety—and we got three. The fourth is serving a lifer in Africa somewhere. Besides, they were all gangland killers, not of the calibre to shoot down a President of France.

‘I got on to Bargeron of Central Records and they’re doing a complete double-check, but I suspect already that we don’t have this man on file. Rodin would in any case insist on that before hiring him.’

Caron lit up another Gaulloise, blew out the smoke and sighed.

‘So we have to start from the foreign end?’

‘Precisely. A man of this type must have got his training and experience somewhere. He wouldn’t be one of the world’s tops unless he could prove it with a string of successful jobs behind him. Not presidents perhaps, but important men, bigger than mere underworld caïds. That means he must have come to someone’s attention somewhere. Surely. What have you arranged?’

Caron picked up one of the sheets of paper, showing a list of names with, in the left-hand column, a series of timings.

‘The seven are all fixed,’ he said. ‘You start with Head of the Office of Domestic Intelligence at ten past seven. That’s ten past one in the morning Washington time. I fitted him in first because of the lateness of the hour in America.

‘Then Brussels at half past seven, Amsterdam at quarter to eight and Bonn at eight-ten. The link is arranged with Johannesburg at eight-thirty and with Scotland Yard at nine. Lastly there is Rome at nine-thirty.’

‘The heads of Homicide in each case?’ asked Lebel.

‘Or the equivalent. With Scotland Yard it’s Mr Anthony Mallinson, Assistant Commissioner Crime. It seems they don’t have a homicide section in the Metropolitan Police. Apart from that, yes, except South Africa. I couldn’t get Van Ruys at all, so you’re talking to Assistant Commissioner Anderson.’

Lebel thought for a moment.

‘That’s fine. I’d prefer Anderson. We worked on a case once. There’s the question of language. Three of them speak English. I suppose only the Belgian speaks French. The others almost certainly can speak English if they have to …’

‘The German, Dietrich, speaks French,’ interjected Caron.

‘Good, then I’ll speak to those two in French personally. For the other five I’ll have to have you on the extension as interpreter. We’d better go. Come on.’

It was ten to seven when the police car carrying the two detectives drew up outside the innocent green door in the tiny Rue Paul Valery which housed the headquarters of Interpol at that time.

For the next three hours Lebel and Caron sat hunched over the telephone in the basement communications room talking to the world’s top crime busters. From the seemingly tangled porcupine of aerials on the roof of the building the high-frequency signals beamed out across three continents, streaming high beyond the stratosphere to bounce off the ionic layer above and home back to earth thousands of miles away to another stick of aluminium jutting from a tiled rooftop.

The wavelengths and scramblers were uninterceptable. Detective spoke to detective while the world drank its morning coffee or final nightcap.

In each telephone conversation Lebel’s appeal was much the same.

‘No, Commissioner, I cannot yet put this request for your assistance on the level of an official enquiry between our two police forces … certainly I am acting in an official capacity … It is simply that for the moment we are just not sure if even the intent to commit an offence has been formulated or put into the preparation stage … It’s a question of a tip-off, purely routine for the moment … Well, we are looking for a man about whom we know extremely little … not even a name, and only a poor description …’

In each case he gave the description as best he knew it. The sting came in the tail, as each of his foreign colleagues asked why their help was being sought, and what clues they could possibly go on. It was at that point that the other end of the line became tensely silent.

‘Simply this; that whoever this man is or may be, he must have one qualification that marks him out … he would have to be one of the world’s top professional contract-hire assassins … no, not a gangland trigger, a political assassin with several successful kills behind him. We would be interested to know if you have anybody like that on your files, even if he has never operated in your own country. Or anybody that even springs to mind.’

Inevitably there was a long pause at the other end before the voice resumed. Then it was quieter, more concerned.

Lebel had no illusions that the heads of the Homicide departments of the major police forces of the Western world would fail to understand what he was hinting at but could not say. There was only one target in France that could interest a first-league political killer.

Without exception the reply was the same. ‘Yes, of course. We’ll go through all the files for you. I’ll try and get back to you before the day is out. Oh, and, Claude, good luck.’

When he put down the radio-telephone receiver for the last time, Lebel wondered how long it would be before the Foreign Ministers and even Prime Ministers of the seven countries would be aware of what was on. Probably not long. Even a policeman had to report to the politicians something of that size. He was fairly certain the Ministers would keep quiet about it. There was, after all, a strong bond over and above political differences between the men of power the world over. They were all members of the same club, the club of the potentates. They stuck together against common enemies, and what could be more inimical to any of them than the activities of a political assassin? He was aware all the same that if the enquiry did become public knowledge and reached the Press, it would be blasted across the world and he would be finished.

The only people who did worry him were the English. If it could only be kept between cops, he would have trusted Mallinson.

But he knew that before the day was out it would have to go higher than Mallinson. It was only seven months since Charles de Gaulle had brusquely rebuffed Britain from the Common Market, and in the wake of the General’s January 14th press conference the London Foreign Office, as even so apolitical a creature as Lebel was aware, had become almost lyrical in its campaign of words planted through the political correspondents against the French President. Would they now use this to get their revenge on the old man?

Lebel stared for a moment at the now silent transmitter panel in front of him. Caron watched him quietly.

‘Come on,’ said the little Commissaire, rising from the stool and heading for the door, ‘let’s get some breakfast and try to get some sleep. There’s not much more we can do now.’

Assistant Commissioner Anthony Mallinson put down the telephone with a thoughtful frown and left the communications room without acknowledging the salute of the young policeman who was entering to take up his morning shift. He was still frowning as he went back upstairs to his spacious but soberly appointed office overlooking the Thames.

There was no doubt in his mind what kind of enquiry Lebel had been making, nor of his motives for making it. The French police had got some kind of a tip-off that a top-class assassin was on the loose, and that it affected them. As Lebel had predicted to himself, it took very little acumen to work out who could be the only possible target in France in August 1963 for that kind of killer. He considered Lebel’s predicament with the knowledge of a long-time policeman.

‘Poor bastard,’ he said aloud as he stared down at the warm and sluggish river flowing past the Embankment beneath his window.

‘Sir?’ asked his personal aide, who had followed him into the office to put the morning mail that needed his attention on the walnut desk.

‘Nothing.’ Mallinson continued to stare out of the window as the PA left. However he might feel for Claude Lebel in his task of trying to protect his president without being able to launch an official manhunt, he too had masters. Sooner or later they would have to be told of Lebel’s request to him that morning. There was the daily heads-of-department conference at ten, in half an hour’s time. Should he mention it there?

On the balance he decided not to. It would be enough to write a formal but private memorandum to the Commissioner himself, outlining the nature of Lebel’s request. The necessity for discretion would explain later, if necessary, why the matter had not been raised at the morning meeting. In the meantime it would do no harm to put through the enquiry without revealing why it was being made.

He took his seat behind the desk and pressed one of the buttons on the intercom.

‘Sir?’ His PA’s voice came through from the adjoining office.

‘Come in here a minute, would you, John?’

The charcoal-grey-suited young detective inspector came in, notebook in hand.

‘John, I want you to get on to Central Records. Speak to Chief Superintendent Markham personally. Tell him the request is from me personally, and that I cannot explain for the moment why I am making it. Ask him to check every existing record of known living professional assassins in this country …’

‘Assassins, sir?’ The PA looked as if the Assistant Commissioner had asked for a routine check on all known Martians.

‘Yes, assassins. Not, repeat not, run-of-the-mill gangland thugs who either have or are known to be capable of knocking off somebody in a feud in the underworld. Political killers, John, men or a man capable of assassinating a well-guarded politician or statesman for money.’

‘That sounds more like Special Branch customers, sir.’

‘Yes, I know. I want to pass the whole thing to Special Branch. But we had better do a routine check first. Oh, and I want an answer one way or the other by midday. OK?’

‘Right, sir, I’ll get on to it.’

Fifteen minutes later Assistant Commissioner Mallinson took his seat at the morning conference.

When he returned to his office he flicked through the mail, pushed it to one side of the desk and ordered the PA to bring him in a typewriter. Sitting alone, he typed out a brief report for the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police. It mentioned briefly the morning call to his home, the person-to-person call over the Interpol link at nine in the morning, and the nature of Lebel’s enquiry. He left the bottom of the memorandum form empty, and locked it away in his desk to get on with the day’s work.

Shortly before twelve the PA knocked and entered.

‘Superintendent Markham’s just been on from CRO,’ he said. ‘Apparently there’s no one on Criminal Records who can fit that description. Seventeen known contract-hire killers from the underworld, sir; ten in jail and seven on the loose. But they all work for the big gangs, either here or in the main cities. The Super says none would fit for a job against a visiting politician. He suggested Special Branch too, sir.’

‘Right, John, thank you. That’s all I needed.’

With the PA dismissed, Mallinson took the half-finished memo from his drawer and re-inserted it into the typewriter. On the bottom he wrote:

‘Criminal Records reported upon enquiry that no person fitting the description of type submitted by Commissaire Lebel could be traced in their files. The enquiry was then passed to the Assistant Commissioner, Special Branch.’

He signed the memorandum and took the top three copies. The remainder went into the waste-paper basket for classified waste, later to be shredded into millions of particles and destroyed.

One of the copies he folded into an envelope and addressed to the Commissioner. The second he filed in the ‘Secret Correspondence’ file and locked it into the wall-safe. The third he folded and placed in his inside pocket.

On his desk note-pad he scribbled a message.

‘To: Commissaire Claude Lebel, Deputy Director-General, Police Judiciaire, Paris.

‘From: Assistant Commissioner Anthony Mallinson, A.C. Crime, Scotland Yard, London.

‘Message: Following your enquiry this date fullest research criminal records reveals no such personage known to us. stop. request passed to Special Branch for further checking. stop. any useful information will be passed to you soonest. stop. mallinson.

‘Time sent: … … . 12.8.63.’

It was just gone half past twelve. He picked up the phone, and when the operator answered, asked for Assistant Commissioner Dixon, head of Special Branch.

‘Hallo, Alec? Tony Mallinson. Can you spare me a minute? I’d love to but I can’t. I shall have to keep lunch down to a sandwich. It’s going to be one of those days. No, I just want to see you for a few minutes before you go. Fine, good, I’ll come right along.’

On his way through the office he dropped the envelope addressed to the Commissioner on the PA’s desk.

‘I’m just going up to see Dixon of the SB. Get that along to the Commissioner’s office would you, John? Personally. And get this message off to the addressee. Type it out yourself in the proper style.’

‘Yessir.’ Mallinson stood over the desk while the detective inspector’s eyes ran through the message. They widened as they reached the end.

‘John …’

‘Sir?’

‘And keep quiet about it, please.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Very quiet, John.’

‘Not a word, sir.’

Mallinson gave him a brief smile and left the office. The PA read the message to Lebel a second time, thought back to the enquiries he had made with Records that morning for Mallinson, worked it out for himself, and whispered ‘Bloody hell.’

Mallinson spent twenty minutes with Dixon and effectively ruined the other’s forthcoming club lunch. He passed over to the Head of Special Branch the remaining copy of the memorandum to the Commissioner. As he rose to leave he turned at the door, hand on the knob.

‘Sorry, Alec, but this really is more up your street. But if you ask me, there’s probably nothing and nobody of that calibre in this country, so a good check of records and you should be able to telex Lebel to say we can’t help. I must say I don’t envy him his job this time.’

Assistant Commissioner Dixon, whose job among other things was to keep tabs on all the weird and crazy of Britain who might think of trying to assassinate a visiting politician, not to mention the scores of embittered and cranky foreigners domiciled in the country, felt even more keenly the impossibility of Lebel’s position. To have to protect home and visiting politicians from unbalanced fanatics was bad enough, but at least they could usually be relied upon as amateurs to fail in the face of his own corps of case-hardened professionals.

To have one’s own head of state the target for a native organisation of tough ex-soldiers was even worse. And yet the French had beaten the OAS. As a professional, Dixon admired them for it. But the hiring of a foreign professional was a different matter. Only one thing could be said in its favour, from Dixon’s point of view; it cut the possibilities down to so few that he had no doubts there would prove to be no Englishman of the calibre of the man Lebel sought on the books of the Special Branch.

After Mallinson had left, Dixon read the carbon copy of the memorandum. Then he summoned his own PA.

‘Please tell Detective Superintendent Thomas I would like to see him here at …’ he glanced at his watch, estimated how long a much shortened lunch-hour would take him … ‘two o’clock sharp.’

The Jackal landed at Brussels National just after twelve. He left his three main pieces of luggage in an automatic locker in the main terminal building and took with him into town only the hand-grip containing his personal effects, the plaster of Paris, pads of cotton wool and bandages. At the main station he dismissed the taxi and went to the left-luggage office.

The fibre suitcase containing the gun was still on the shelf where he had seen the clerk deposit it a week earlier. He presented the reclamation slip and was given the case in return.

Not far from the station he found a small and squalid hotel, of the kind that seem to exist in proximity to all main line stations the world over, which ask no questions but get told a lot of lies.

He booked a single room for the night, paid cash in advance in Belgian money that he had changed at the airport, and took his case up to the room himself. With the door safely locked behind him, he ran a basin of cold water, emptied the plaster and bandages on to the bed, and set to work.

It took over two hours for the plaster to dry when he had finished. During this time he sat with his heavy foot and leg resting on a stool, smoking his filter cigarettes and looking out over the grimy array of roof-tops that formed the vista from the bedroom window. Occasionally he would test the plaster with his thumb, each time deciding to let it harden a bit more before moving.

The fibre suitcase that had formerly contained the gun lay empty. The remainder of the bandages were re-packed in the hand-grip along with the few ounces of plaster that were left, in case he had to do some running repairs. When he was finally ready he slid the cheap fibre case under the bed, checked the room for any last telltale signs, emptied the ashtray out of the window, and prepared to leave.

He found that with the plaster on a realistic limp became obligatory. At the bottom of the stairs he was relieved to find the grubby and sleepy-looking desk clerk was in the back room behind the desk, where he had been when the Jackal arrived. Being lunchtime, he was eating, but the door with the frosted glass that gave him access to the front counter was open.

With a glance at the front door to make sure no one was coming in, the Jackal clutched his hand-case to his chest, bent on to all fours and scuttled quickly and silently across the tiled hall. Because of the heat of summer the front door was open and he was able to stand upright on the top of the three steps that led to the street, out of the line of sight of the desk clerk.

He limped painfully down the steps and along the street to the corner where the main road ran past. A taxi spotted him inside half a minute, and he was on his way back to the airport.

He presented himself at the Alitalia counter, passport in hand. The girl smiled at him.

‘I believe you have a ticket for Milan reserved two days ago in the name of Duggan,’ he said.

She checked the bookings for the afternoon flight to Milan. It was due to leave in an hour and a half.

‘Yes indeed,’ she beamed at him. ‘Meester Duggan. The ticket was reserved but not paid for. You wish to pay for it?’

The Jackal paid in cash again, was issued with his ticket, and told he would be called in an hour. With the aid of a solicitous porter who tut-tutted over his plastered foot and pronounced limp, he withdrew his three suitcases from the locker, consigned them to Alitalia, passed through the Customs barrier which, seeing that he was an outgoing traveller, was merely a passport check, and spent the remaining hour enjoying a late but pleasant lunch in the restaurant attached to the passenger departure lounge.

Everybody concerned with the flight was very kind and considerate towards him because of the leg. He was assisted aboard the coach out to the aircraft and watched with concern as he made his painful way up the steps to the aircraft’s door. The lovely Italian hostess gave him an extra wide smile of welcome and saw him comfortably seated in one of the group of seats in the centre of the aircraft that face towards each other. There was more leg-room there, she pointed out.

The other passengers took elaborate pains not to knock against the plastered foot as they took their seats, while the Jackal lay back in his seat and smiled bravely.

At 4.15 the airliner was on take-off, and soon speeding southwards bound for Milan.

Superintendent Bryn Thomas emerged from the Assistant Commissioner’s office just before three feeling thoroughly miserable. Not only was his summer cold one of the worst and most persistent he had ever been plagued with, but the new assignment with which he had just been saddled had ruined his day.

As Monday mornings went it had been rotten; first he had learned that one of his men had been slipped by a Soviet trade delegate whom he was supposed to be tailing, and by mid-morning he had received an inter-departmental complaint from MI-5 politely asking his department to lay off the Soviet delegation, an unmistakable suggestion that in the view of MI-5 the whole matter had better be left to them.

Monday afternoon looked like being worse. There are few things that any policeman, Special Branch or not, likes less than the spectre of the political assassin. But in the case of the request he had just received from his superior, he had not even been given a name to go on.

‘No name, but I’m afraid plenty of pack-drill,’ had been Dixon’s bon mot on the subject. ‘Try and get it out of the way by tomorrow.’

‘Pack-drill,’ snorted Thomas when he reached the office. Although the short-list of known suspects would be extremely short, it still presented him and his department with hours of checking of files, records for political trouble-making, convictions and, unlike the criminal branch, mere suspicions. All would have to be checked. There was only one ray of light in Dixon’s briefing: the man would be a professional operator and not one of the numberless bee-in-the-bonnet merchants that made the Special Branch’s life a misery before and during any foreign statesman’s visit.

He summoned two detective inspectors whom he knew to be presently engaged on low-priority research work, told them to drop whatever they were doing, as he had done, and to report to his office. His briefing to them was shorter than Dixon’s had been to him. He confined himself to telling them what they were looking for, but not why. The suspicions of the French police that such a man might be out to kill General de Gaulle need have nothing to do with the search through the archives and records of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch.

The three of them cleared the desks of outstanding paperwork and settled down.

The Jackal’s plane touched down at Linate Airport, Milan, shortly after six. He was helped by the ever-attentive hostess down the steps to the tarmac, and escorted by one of the ground hostesses to the main terminal building. It was at Customs that his elaborate preparations in getting the component parts of the gun out of the suitcases and into a less suspicious means of carriage paid dividends. The passport check was a formality but as the suitcases from the hold came rumbling through on the conveyor belt and were deposited along the length of the Customs bench, the risks began to mount.

The Jackal secured a porter who assembled the three main suitcases into a line side by side. The Jackal put his hand-grip down beside them. Seeing him limp up to the bench, one of the Customs officers sauntered across.

‘Signor? This is all your baggage?’

‘Er, yes, these three suitcases and this little case.’

‘You have anything to declare?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘You are on business, signor?’

‘No, I’ve come on holiday, but it turns out it must also include a period of convalescence. I hope to go up to the lakes.’

The Customs man was not impressed.

‘May I see your passport, signor?’

The Jackal handed it over. The Italian examined it closely, then handed it back without a word.

‘Please, open this one.’

He gestured at one of the three larger suitcases. The Jackal took out his key-ring, selected one of the keys and opened the case. The porter had laid it flat on its side to help him. Fortunately it was the case containing the clothes of the fictitious Danish pastor and the American student. Riffling through the clothes, the Customs officer attached no importance to a dark-grey suit, underwear, white shirt, sneakers, black walking shoes, windcheater and socks. Nor did the book in Danish excite him. The cover was a colour plate of Chartres Cathedral, and the title, although in Danish, was sufficiently like the equivalent English words not to be remarkable. He did not examine the carefully re-sewn slit in the side lining, nor find the false identity papers. A really thorough search would have found them, but his was the usual perfunctory run-through that would only have become intensive if he had found something suspicious. The component parts of a complete sniper’s rifle were only three feet away from him across the desk, but he suspected nothing. He closed the case and gestured to the Jackal to lock it again. Then he chalked all four cases in quick succession. His job done, the Italian’s face broke into a smile.

‘Grazie, signor. A ’appy holiday.’

The porter found a taxi, was well tipped, and soon the Jackal was speeding into Milan, its usually clamorous streets made even noisier by the streams of commuter traffic trying to get home and the hooter-conscious behaviour of the drivers. He asked to be taken to the Central Station.

Here another porter was summoned, and he hobbled after the man to the left-luggage office. In the taxi he had slipped the steel shears out of the overnight case into his trouser pocket. At the left-luggage office he deposited the hand-grip and two suitcases, retaining the one containing the long French military overcoat, which also had plenty of spare room.

Dismissing the porter he hobbled into the men’s toilet, to find only one of the washbasins in the long row on the left-hand side of the urinals was in use. He dropped the case and laboriously washed his hands until the other occupant was finished. When the toilet was empty for a second he was across the room and locked into one of the cubicles.

With his foot up on the lavatory seat he clipped silently for ten minutes at the plaster on his foot until it began to drop away, revealing the cotton-wool pads beneath that had given the foot the bulk of a normally fractured ankle encased in plaster.

When the foot was finally clear of the last remnants of plaster he put back on the silk sock and the slim leather moccasin which had been taped to the inside of his calf while the foot had been in plaster. The remainder of the plaster and cotton wool he gathered up and deposited down the pan. At the first flushing half of it jammed, but it cleared at the second.

Laying the suitcase on top of the toilet, he laid the series of circular steel tubes containing the rifle side by side among the folds of the coat until the case was full. When the inside straps were tight the contents of the case were prevented from banging about. Then he closed the case and cast a look outside the door. There were two people at the washbasins and two more standing at the urinals. He left the cubicle, turned sharply towards the door and was up the steps into the main hall of the station before any had time to notice him, even if they had wished to.

He could not go back to the left-luggage office a fit and healthy man so soon after leaving it as a cripple, so he summoned a porter, explained that he was in a hurry, wished to change money, reclaim his baggage and get a taxi as soon as possible. The baggage check he thrust into the porter’s hand, along with a thousand-lire note, pointing the man towards the left-luggage office. He himself, he indicated, would be in the bureau de change getting his English pounds changed into lire.

The Italian nodded happily and went off to get the luggage. The Jackal changed the last twenty pounds that remained to him into Italian currency, and was just finished when the porter returned with the other three pieces of luggage. Two minutes later he was in a taxi speeding dangerously across the Piazza Duca d’Aosta and heading for the Hotel Continentale.

At the reception desk in the splendid front hall he told the clerk:

‘I believe you have a room for me in the name of Duggan. It was booked by telephone from London two days ago.’

Just before eight the Jackal was enjoying the luxury of a shower and shave in his room. Two of the suitcases were carefully locked into the wardrobe. The third, containing his own clothes, was open on the bed and the suit for the evening, a navy-blue wool-and-mohair summer lightweight, was hanging from the wardrobe door. The dove-grey suit was in the hands of the hotel’s valet service for sponging and pressing. Ahead lay cocktails, dinner and an early night, for the next day, August 13th, would be extremely busy.

13

‘NOTHING.’

The second of the two young detective inspectors in Bryn Thomas’s office closed the last of the folders he had been allotted to read and looked across at his superior.

His colleague had also finished, and his conclusion had been the same. Thomas himself had finished five minutes before and had walked over to the window, standing with his back to the room and staring at the traffic flowing past in the dusk. Unlike Assistant Commissioner Mallinson, he did not have a view of the river, just a first-floor vista of the cars churning down Horseferry Road. He felt like death. His throat was raw from cigarettes, which he knew he should not have been smoking with a heavy cold, but could not give up, particularly when under pressure.

His head ached from the fumes, the incessant calls that had been made throughout the afternoon checking on characters turned up in the records and files. Each call-back had been negative. Either the man was fully accounted for, or simply not of the calibre to undertake a mission like killing the French President.

‘Right, that’s it, then,’ he said firmly, spinning round from the window. ‘We’ve done all we can, and there just isn’t anybody who could possibly fit the guide-lines laid down in the request we have been investigating.’

‘It could be that there is an Englishman who does this kind of work,’ suggested one of the inspectors. ‘But he’s not on our files.’

‘They’re all on our files, look you,’ growled Thomas. It did not amuse him to think that as interesting a fish as a professional assassin existed in his ‘manor’ without being on file somewhere, and his temper was not improved by his cold or his headache. When ill-tempered his Welsh accent tended to intensify. Thirty years away from the valleys had never quite eradicated the lilt.

‘After all,’ said the other inspector, ‘a political killer is an extremely rare bird. There probably isn’t such a thing in this country. It’s not quite the English cup of tea, is it?’

Thomas glowered back. He preferred the word British to describe the inhabitants of the United Kingdom, and the inspector’s inadvertent use of the word English he suspected might be a veiled suggestion that the Welsh, Scottish or Irish could well have produced such a man. But it wasn’t.

‘All right, pack up the files. Take them back to registry. I’ll reply that a thorough search has revealed no such character known to us. That’s all we can do.’

‘Who was the enquiry from, Super?’ asked one.

‘Never you mind, boy. Someone’s got problems by the look of it, but it isn’t us.’

The two younger men had gathered up all the material and headed for the door. Both had families to get home to, and one was expecting to become a first-time father almost any day. He was the first to the door. The other turned back with a thoughtful frown.

‘Super, there’s one thing occurred to me while I was checking. If there is such a man, and he’s got British nationality, it seems he probably wouldn’t operate here anyway. I mean, even a man like that has to have a base somewhere. A refuge, sort of, a place to come back to. Chances are such a man is a respectable citizen in his own country.’

‘What are you getting at, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde?’

‘Well, something like that. I mean, if there is a professional killer about of the type we’ve been trying to track, and he’s big enough for somebody to pull the kind of weight to get an investigation like this started, with a man of your rank leading it, well the man in question must be big. And if he’s that, in his field, he must have a few jobs behind him. Otherwise he wouldn’t be anything, would he?’

‘Go on,’ said Thomas, watching him carefully.

‘Well, I just thought that a man like that would probably operate only outside his own country. So he wouldn’t normally come to the attention of the internal security forces. Perhaps the Service might have got wind of him once …’

Thomas considered the idea, then slowly shook his head. ‘Forget it, get on home, boy. I’ll write the report. And just forget we ever made the enquiry.’

But when the inspector was gone the idea he had sown remained in Thomas’s mind. He could sit down and write the report now. Completely negative. Drawn a blank. There could be no comebacks on the basis of the search of records that had been made. But supposing there was something behind the enquiry from France? Supposing the French had not, as Thomas suspected they had, simply lost their heads over a rumour concerning their precious President? If they really had as little to go on as they claimed, if there was no indication that the man was an Englishman, then they must be checking all over the world in a similar way. Chances were heavily odds-on there was no killer, and if there were, that he came from one of those nations with long histories of political assassinations. But what if the French suspicions were accurate? And if the man turned out to be English, even by birth alone?

Thomas was intensely proud of the record of Scotland Yard, and particularly of the Special Branch. They had never had trouble of this kind. They had never lost a visiting foreign dignitary, never even a smell of scandal. He personally had even had to look after that little Russian bastard, Ivan Serov, head of the KGB, when he came to prepare for Khrushchev’s visit, and there had been scores of Balts and Poles who wanted to get Serov. Not even a shooting, and the place crawling with Serov’s own security men, every one packing a gun and quite prepared to use it.

Superintendent Bryn Thomas had two years to go before retirement and the journey back to the little house he and Meg had bought looking out over the green turf to the Bristol Channel. Better be safe, check everything.

In his youth Thomas had been a very fine rugby player, and there were many who had played against Glamorgan who remembered clearly the inadvisability of making a blind-side break when Bryn Thomas was wing forward. He was too old for it now, of course, but he still took a keen interest in the London Welsh when he could get away from work and go down to the Old Deer Park at Richmond to see them play. He knew all the players well, spending time in the club house chatting with them after a match, and his reputation was enough to ensure that he was always welcome.

One of the players was known to the rest of the members simply to be on the staff of the Foreign Office. Thomas knew he was a bit more than that; the department, under the auspices of the Foreign Secretary but not attached to the Foreign Office, for which Barrie Lloyd worked was the Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes called the SIS, sometimes simply ‘The Service’ and more usually among the public by its incorrect name of MI-6.

Thomas lifted the telephone on his desk and asked for a number …

The two men met for a drink in a quiet pub down by the river between eight and nine. They talked rugby for a while, as Thomas bought the drinks. But Lloyd guessed the man from Special Branch had not asked to see him at a riverside pub to talk about a game for which the season would not start for another two months. When they had both got their drinks, and given each other a perfunctory ‘Cheers’, Thomas gestured with his head outside on to the terrace that led down to the wharf. It was quieter outside, for most of the young couples from Chelsea and Fulham were drinking up and heading off for dinner.

‘Got a bit of a problem, boyo,’ began Thomas. ‘Hoped you might be able to help.’

‘Well … if I can,’ said Lloyd.

Thomas explained about the request from Paris, and the blank drawn by Criminal Records and the Special Branch.

‘It occurred to me that if there ever was such a man, and a British one at that, he might be the kind who would never get his hands dirty inside this country, see. Might just stick to operations abroad. If he ever had left a trail, maybe he came to the attention of the Service?’

‘Service?’ asked Lloyd quietly.

‘Come on, Barrie. We have to know a lot of things, from time to time.’ Thomas’s voice was hardly above a murmur. From the back they looked like two men in dark suits staring out over the dusky river at the lights of the south bank, talking of the day’s dealings in the City. ‘We had to turn over a lot of files during the Blake investigations. A lot of Foreign Office people got a peek taken at what they were really up to. Yours was one, see. You were in his section at the time he came under suss. So I know what department you work with.’

‘I see,’ said Lloyd.

‘Now look, I may be Bryn Thomas down at the Park. But I’m also a superintendent of the SB, right? You can’t all be anonymous from everyone, now can you?’

Lloyd stared into his glass.

‘Is this an official enquiry for information?’

‘No, I can’t make it that yet. The French request was an unofficial request from Lebel to Mallinson. He could find nothing in Central Records, so he replied that he couldn’t help, but he also had a word with Dixon. Who asked me to have a quick check. All on the quiet, see? Sometimes things have to be done that way. Very delicate, all this. Mustn’t get out to the Press or anything. Chances are there’s nothing here in Britain at all that might help Lebel. I just thought I’d cover all the angles, and you were the last.’

‘This man is supposed to be after De Gaulle?’

‘Must be, by the sound of the enquiry. But the French must be playing it very cagey. They obviously don’t want any publicity.’

‘Obviously. But why not contact us direct?’

‘The request for suggestions as to a name has been put through on the old boy network. From Lebel to Mallinson, direct. Perhaps the French Secret Service doesn’t have an old boy network with your section.’

If Lloyd had noticed the reference to the notoriously bad relations between the SDECE and the SIS, he gave no sign of it.

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Thomas after a while.

‘Funny,’ said Lloyd staring out over the river. ‘You remember the Philby case?’

‘Of course.’

‘Still a very sore nerve in our section,’ resumed Lloyd. ‘He went over from Beirut in January ’61. Of course, it didn’t get out until later, but it caused a hell of a rumpus inside the Service. A lot of people got moved around. Had to be done, he had blown most of the Arab Section and some others as well. One of the men who had to be moved very fast was our top resident in the Caribbean. He had been with Philby in Beirut six months before, then transferred to Carib.

‘About the same time the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, was assassinated on a lonely road outside Ciudad Trujillo. According to the reports he was killed by partisans—he had a lot of enemies. Our man came back to London then, and we shared an office for a while until he was re-deployed. He mentioned a rumour that Trujillo’s car was stopped, for the ambushers to blow it open and kill the man inside, by a single shot from a marksman with a rifle. It was a hell of a shot—from one hundred and fifty yards at a speeding car. Went through the little triangular window on the driver’s side, the one that wasn’t of bullet-proof glass. The whole car was armoured. Hit the driver through the throat and he crashed. That was when the partisans closed in. The odd thing was, rumour had it the shooter was an Englishman.’

There was a long pause as the two men, the empty beer mugs swinging from their fingers, stared across the now quite darkened waters of the Thames. Both had a mental picture of a harsh, arid landscape in a hot and distant island; of a car careering at seventy miles an hour off a bitumen strip and into the rocky verge; of an old man in fawn twill and gold braid, who had ruled his kingdom with an iron and ruthless hand for thirty years, being dragged from the wreck to be finished off with pistols in the dust by the roadside.

‘This … man … in the rumour. Did he have a name?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was just talk in the office at the time. We had an awful lot on our plate then, and a Caribbean dictator was the last thing we needed to worry about.’

‘This colleague, the one who talked to you. Did he write a report?’

‘Must have done. Standard practice. But it was just a rumour, understand. Just a rumour. Nothing to go on. We deal in facts, solid information.’

‘But it must have been filed, somewhere?’

‘Suppose so,’ said Lloyd. ‘Very low priority, only a bar rumour in that area. Place abounds in rumours.’

‘But you could just have a look back at the files, like? See if the man on the mountain had a name?’

Lloyd pulled himself off the rail.

‘You get on home,’ he said to the Superintendent. ‘I’ll ring you if there’s anything that might help.’

They walked back into the rear bar of the pub, deposited the glasses, and made for the street door.

‘I’d be grateful,’ said Thomas as they shook hands. ‘Probably nothing in it. But just on the off-chance.’

While Thomas and Lloyd were talking above the waters of the Thames, and the Jackal was scooping the last drops of his Zabaglione from the glass in a roof-top restaurant in Milan, Commissaire Claude Lebel attended the first of the progress report meetings in the conference room of the Interior Ministry in Paris.

The attendance was the same as it had been twenty-four hours earlier. The Interior Minister sat at the head of the table, with the department heads down each side. Claude Lebel sat at the other end with a small folder in front of him. The Minister nodded curtly for the meeting to begin.

His chef de cabinet spoke first. Over the previous day and night, he said, every Customs officer on every border post in France had received instructions to check through the luggage of tall blond male foreigners entering France. Passports particularly were to be checked, and were to be scrutinised by the DST official at the Customs post for possible forgeries. (The head of the DST inclined his head in acknowledgement.) Tourists and business men entering France might well remark a sudden increase in vigilance at Customs, but it was felt unlikely that any victim of such a baggage search would realise it was being applied across the country to tall blond men. If any enquiries were made by a sharp-eyed Press man, the explanation would be that they were nothing but routine snap searches. But it was felt no enquiry would ever be made.

He had one other thing to report. A proposal had been made that the possibility be considered of making a snatch on one of the three OAS chiefs in Rome. The Quai d’Orsay had come out strongly against such an idea for diplomatic reasons (they had not been told of the Jackal plot) and they were being backed in this by the President (who was aware of the reason). This must therefore be discounted as a way out of their difficulties.

General Guibaud for the SDECE said a complete check of their records had failed to reveal knowledge of the existence of a professional political killer outside the ranks of the OAS or its sympathisers, and who could not be completely accounted for.

The head of Renseignements Généraux said a search through France’s criminal archives had revealed the same thing, not only among Frenchmen but also among foreigners who had ever tried to operate inside France.

The chief of the DST then made his report. At 7.30 that morning a call had been intercepted from a post office near the Gare du Nord to the number of the Rome hotel where the three OAS chiefs were staying. Since their appearance there eight weeks before, operators on the international switchboard had been instructed to report all calls placed to that number. The one on duty that morning had been slow on the uptake. The call had been placed before he had realised that the number was the one on his list. He had put the call through, and only then rung the DST. However, he had had the sense to listen in. The message had been: ‘Valmy to Poitiers. The Jackal is blown. Repeat. The Jackal is blown. Kowalski was taken. Sang before dying. Ends.’

There was silence in the room for several seconds.

‘How did they find out?’ asked Lebel quietly from the far end of the table. All eyes turned on him, except those of Colonel Rolland who was staring at the opposite wall deep in thought.

‘Damn,’ he said clearly, still staring at the wall. The eyes swivelled back to the head of the Action Service.

The Colonel snapped out of his reverie.

‘Marseilles,’ he said shortly. ‘To get Kowalski to come from Rome we used a bait. An old friend called J0J0 Grzybowski. The man has a wife and daughter. We kept them all in protective custody until Kowalski was in our hands. Then we allowed them to return home. All I wanted from Kowalski was information about his chiefs. There was no reason to suspect this Jackal plot at the time. There was no reason why they should not know we had got Kowalski—then. Later of course things changed. It must have been the Pole J0J0 who tipped off the agent Valmy. Sorry.’

‘Did the DST pick Valmy up in the post office?’ asked Lebel.

‘No, we missed him by a couple of minutes, thanks to the stupidity of the operator,’ replied the man from DST.

‘A positive chapter of inefficiency,’ snapped Colonel Saint-Clair suddenly. A number of unfriendly glances were levelled at him.

‘We are feeling our way, largely in the dark, against an unknown adversary,’ replied General Guibaud. ‘If the Colonel would like to volunteer to take over the operation, and all the responsibility it implies…’

The Colonel from the Elysée Palace studiously examined his folders as if they were more important and of greater consequence than the veiled threat from the head of the SDECE. But he realised it had not been a wise remark.

‘In a way,’ mused the Minister, ‘it might be as well they know their hired gun is blown. Surely they must call the operation off now?’

‘Precisely,’ said Saint-Clair, trying to recoup, ‘the Minister is right. They would be crazy to go ahead now. They’ll simply call the man off.’

‘He isn’t exactly blown,’ said Lebel quietly. They had almost forgotten he was there. ‘We still don’t know the man’s name. The forewarning might simply cause him to take extra contingency precautions. False papers, physical disguises …’

The optimism to which the Minister’s remark had given birth round the table vanished. Roger Frey eyed the little Commissaire with respect.

‘I think we had better have Commissaire Lebel’s report, gentlemen. After all, he is heading this enquiry. We are here to assist him where we can.’

Thus prompted, Lebel outlined the measures he had taken since the previous evening; the growing belief, supported by the check through the French files, that the foreigner could only be on the files of some foreign police force, if at all. The request to make enquiries abroad; request granted. The series of person-to-person phone calls via Interpol to police chiefs of seven major countries.

‘The replies came in during the course of today,’ he concluded. ‘Here they are: Holland, nothing. Italy, several known contract-hire killers, but all in the employ of the Mafia. Discreet enquiries between the Carabinieri and the Capo of Rome elicited a pledge that no Mafia killer would ever do a political killing except on orders, and the Mafia would not subscribe to killing a foreign statesman.’ Lebel looked up. ‘Personally, I am inclined to believe that is probably true.

‘Britain. Nothing, but routine enquiries have been passed to another department, the Special Branch, for further checking.’

‘Slow as always,’ muttered Saint-Clair under his breath. Lebel caught the remark and looked up again.

‘But very thorough, our English friends. Do not underestimate Scotland Yard.’ He resumed reading.

‘America. Two possibles. One the right-hand man of a big international arms dealer based in Miami, Florida. This man was formerly a US Marine, later a CIA man in the Caribbean. Fired for killing a Cuban anti-Castroist in a fight just before the Bay of Pigs affair. The Cuban was to have commanded a section of that operation. The American then was taken on by the arms dealer, one of the men the CIA had unofficially used to supply arms to the Bay of Pigs invading force. Believed to have been responsible for two unexplained accidents that happened later to rivals of his employer in the arms business. Arms dealing, it seems, is a very cut-throat business. The man’s name is Charles “Chuck” Arnold. The FBI is now checking for his whereabouts.

‘The second man suggested by FBI as a possible. Marco Vitellino, formerly personal bodyguard to a New York gangland boss, Albert Anastasia. This Capo was shot to death in a barber’s chair in October ’57 and Vitellino fled America in fear of his own life. Settled in Caracas, Venezuela. Tried to go into the rackets there on his own account, but with little success. He was frozen out by the local underworld. FBI think that if he was completely broke he might be in the market for a contract killing job for a foreign organisation, if the price were right.’

There was complete silence in the room. The fourteen other men listened without a murmur.

‘Belgium. One possibility. Psychopathic homicide, formerly on the staff of Tschombe in Katanga. Expelled by United Nations when captured in 1962. Unable to return to Belgium because of pending charges on two counts of murder. A hired gun, but a clever one. Name of Jules Bérenger. Believed also emigrated to Central America. Belgian police are still checking on his possible present whereabouts.

‘Germany. One suggestion. Hans-Dieter Kassel, former SS-Major, wanted by two countries for war crimes. Lived after the war in West Germany under an assumed name, and was a contract-killer for ODESSA, the ex-SS members’ underground organisation. Suspected of being implicated in the killing of two left-wing Socialists in post-war politics who were urging a government-sponsored intensification of enquiries into war crimes. Later unmasked as Kassel, but skipped to Spain after a tip-off for which a senior police official lost his job. Believed now living in retirement in Madrid …’

Lebel looked up again. ‘Incidentally, this man’s age seems to be a bit advanced for this sort of job. He is now fifty-seven.’

‘Lastly, South Africa. One possible. Professional mercenary. Name: Piet Schuyper. Also one of Tschombe’s top gunmen. Nothing officially against him in South Africa, but he’s considered undesirable. A crackshot, and a definite penchant for individual killing. Last heard of when expelled from the Congo on the collapse of the Katangese secession early this year. Believed to be still in West Africa somewhere. The South African Special Branch is checking further.’

He stopped and looked up. The fourteen men round the table were looking back at him without expression.

‘Of course,’ said Lebel deprecatingly, ‘it’s very vague, I’m afraid. For one thing I only tried the seven most likely countries. The Jackal could be a Swiss, or Austrian, or something else. Then three countries out of seven replied that they have no suggestion to make. They could be wrong. The Jackal could be an Italian, or Dutchman or English. Or he could be South African, Belgian, German or American, but not among those listed. One doesn’t know. One is feeling in the dark, hoping for a break.’

‘Mere hoping isn’t going to get us far,’ snapped Saint-Clair.

‘Perhaps the Colonel has a fresh suggestion?’ enquired Lebel politely.

‘Personally, I feel the man has certainly been warned off,’ said Saint-Clair icily. ‘He could never get near the President now that his plan has been exposed. However much Rodin and his henchmen have promised to pay this Jackal, they will ask for their money back and cancel the operation.’

‘You feel the man has been warned off,’ interposed Lebel softly, ‘but feeling is not far from hoping. I would prefer to continue enquiries for the present.’

‘What is the position of these enquiries now, Commissaire?’ asked the Minister.

‘Already, Minister, the police forces who have made these suggestions are beginning to send by telex the complete dossiers. I expect to have the last by noon tomorrow. Pictures will also come by wire. Some of the police forces are continuing enquiries to try and pin the whereabouts of the suspect down, so that we can take over.’

‘Do you think they will keep their mouths shut?’ asked Sanguinetti.

‘There’s no reason for them not to,’ replied Lebel. ‘Hundreds of highly confidential enquiries are made each year by senior policemen of the Interpol countries, some of them on an unofficial person-to-person basis. Fortunately all countries, whatever their political outlook, are opposed to crime. So we are not involved in the same rivalries as the more political branches of international relations. Co-operation among police forces is very good.’

‘Even for political crime?’ asked Frey.

‘For policemen, Minister, it’s all crime. That is why I preferred to contact my foreign colleagues rather than enquire through foreign ministries. Doubtless the superiors of these colleagues must learn that the enquiry was made, but there would be no good reason for them to make mischief. The political assassin is the world’s outlaw.’

‘But so long as they know the enquiry was made, they can work out the implications and still privately sneer at our President,’ snapped Saint-Clair.

‘I do not see why they should do that. It might be one of them, one day,’ said Lebel.

‘You do not know much about politics if you are not aware how some people would be delighted to know a killer is after the President of France,’ replied Saint-Clair. ‘This public knowledge is precisely what the President was so anxious to avoid.’

‘It is not public knowledge,’ corrected Lebel. ‘It is extremely private knowledge, confined to a tiny handful of men who carry in their heads secrets that, if revealed, might well ruin half the politicians of their own countries. Some of these men know most of the inner details of installations that protect Western security. They have to, in order to protect them. If they were not discreet, they would not hold the jobs they do.’

‘Better a few men should know we are looking for a killer than they should receive invitations to attend the President’s funeral,’ growled Bouvier. ‘We’ve been fighting the OAS for two years. The President’s instructions were that it must not become a press sensation and public talking point.’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ interposed the Minister. ‘Enough of this. It was I who authorised Commissaire Lebel to make discreet enquiries among the heads of foreign police services, after …’ he glanced at Saint-Clair … ‘consulting with the President.

The general amusement at the Colonel’s discomfiture was ill-concealed.

‘Is there anything else?’ asked M. Frey.

Rolland raised a hand briefly.

‘We have a permanent bureau in Madrid,’ he said. ‘There are a number of refugee OAS in Spain, that’s why we keep it there. We could check on the Nazi, Kassel, without bothering the West Germans about it. I understand our relations with the Bonn Foreign Office are still not of the best.’

His reference to the Argoud snatch of February and the consequent anger of Bonn brought a few smiles. Frey raised his eyebrows at Lebel.

‘Thank you,’ said the detective, ‘that would be most helpful, if you could pin the man down. For the rest there is nothing, except to ask that all departments continue to assist me as they have been doing over the past twenty-four hours.’

‘Then until tomorrow, gentlemen,’ said the Minister briskly and rose, gathering his papers. The meeting broke up.

Outside on the steps, Lebel gratefully drew in a lungful of the mild night air of Paris. The clocks truck twelve and ushered in Tuesday, August 13th.

It was just after twelve when Barrie Lloyd rang Superintendent Thomas at his home in Chiswick. Thomas was just about to put the bedside light out, thinking the SIS man would ring in the morning.

‘I found the flimsy of the report we were talking about,’ said Lloyd. ‘I was right in a way. It was just a routine report of a rumour running round the island at that time. Marked “No action to be taken” almost as soon as it was filed. Like I said, we were pretty tied up with other things at that time.’

‘Was any name mentioned?’ asked Thomas quietly, so as not to disturb his wife who was asleep.

‘Yes, a British business man on the island, who disappeared around that time. He might have had nothing to do with it, but his name was linked in the gossip. Name of Charles Calthrop.’

‘Thanks, Barrie. I’ll follow it in the morning.’ He put the phone down and went to sleep.

Lloyd, being a meticulous young man, made a brief report of the request and his reply to it, and dispatched it to Requirements. In the small hours the night duty man on requirements examined it quizzically for a moment, and as it concerned Paris, put it in the pouch for the Foreign Office’s France Desk, the entire pouch to be delivered personally according to routine to Head of France when he came in later the same morning.

14

THE JACKAL ROSE AT his habitual hour of 7.30, drank the tea placed by his bedside, washed, showered and shaved. Once dressed, he took the wad of one thousand pounds from inside the lining of his suitcase, slipped it into his breast pocket and went down for breakfast. At nine o’clock he was on the pavement of the Via Manzoni outside the hotel, and striding down the road looking for banks. For two hours he went from one to another, changing the English pounds. Two hundred were changed into Italian lire and the remaining eight hundred into French francs.

By mid-morning he was finished with this task, and broke for a cup of Espresso on a café terrace. After that he set out on his second search. After numerous enquiries he found himself in one of the back streets off the Porta Garibaldi, a working-class area near the Garibaldi Station. Here he found what he was looking for, a row of lock-up garages. One of these he hired from the proprietor who ran the garage on the corner of the street. The hire charge for two days was ten thousand lire, well above the odds but then it was a very short let.

In a local hardware store he bought a set of overalls, a pair of metal clippers, several yards of thin steel wire, a soldering iron and a foot of solder rod. These he packed into a canvas grip bought at the same store, and deposited the grip in the garage. Pocketing the key, he went off for lunch at a trattoria in the more fashionable centre of the city.

In the early afternoon, after making an appointment by phone from the trattoria, he arrived by taxi at a small and not-too-prosperous car-hire firm. Here he hired a second-hand 1962 vintage Alfa Romeo sports two-seater. He explained that he wished to tour Italy for the forthcoming fortnight, the length of his holiday in Italy, and return the car at the end of that time.

His passport and British and international driving licences were in order, and insurance was arranged within the hour from a nearby firm which habitually handled the business of the hire-car firm. The deposit was heavy, the equivalent to over a hundred pounds, but by the mid-afternoon the car was his, the keys in the ignition, and the proprietor of the firm wishing him a happy holiday.

Previous enquiries with the Automobile Association in London had assured him that as both France and Italy were members of the Common Market, there were no complicated formalities for driving an Italian-registered car into France, provided the driving licences, car registration hire documents and insurance cover were in order.

From a personal enquiry at the reception desk of the Auto-mobil Club Italiano on the Corso Venezia he was given the name of a highly respectable insurance firm close by, which specialised in offering motor insurance cover for travel in foreign countries. Here he paid cash for extra insurance cover for an expedition into France. This firm, he was assured, enjoyed a mutual relationship with a large French insurance company, and their cover would be accepted without question.

From here he drove the Alfa back to the Continentale, parked it in the hotel car-park, went up to his room and retrieved the suitcase containing the component parts of the sniper’s rifle. Shortly after teatime he was back in the mews street where he had hired the lock-up garage.

With the door safely shut behind him, the cable from the soldering iron plugged into the overhead light socket, and a high-powered torch lying on the floor beside him to illuminate the underside of the car, he went to work. For two hours he carefully welded the thin steel tubes that contained the rifle parts into the inner flange of the Alfa’s chassis. One of the reasons for choosing an Alfa had been because a search through motor magazines in London had taught him that among Italian cars the Alfa possessed a stout steel chassis with a deep flange on the inner side.

The tubes themselves were each wrapped in a thin sock of sacking material. The steel wire lashed them tightly inside the flange, and the places where the wire touched the chassis’ edge were spot-welded with the soldering iron.

By the time he was finished the overalls were smeared with grease from the garage floor and his hands ached from the exertions of heaving the wire tighter round the chassis. But the job was done. The tubes were almost undetectable except to a close search made from underneath the car, and would soon be coated with dust and mud.

He packed the overalls, soldering iron and the remains of the wire into the canvas grip and dumped it under a pile of old rags in the far corner of the garage. The metal clippers went into the glove compartment set in the dashboard.

Dusk was settling again over the city when he finally emerged at the wheel of the Alfa, the suitcase shut into the boot. He closed and locked the garage door, pocketed the key and drove back to the hotel.

Twenty-four hours after his arrival in Milan he was again in his room, showering away the exertions of the day, soaking his smarting hands in a bowl of cold water, before dressing for cocktails and dinner.

Stopping at the reception desk before going into the bar for his habitual Campari and soda, he asked for his bill to be made up for settlement after dinner, and for a morning call with a cup of tea at five-thirty the following morning.

After a second splendid dinner he settled the bill with the remainder of his lire and was in bed asleep by shortly after eleven.

Sir Jasper Quigley stood with his back to the office, hands clasped behind him, and stared down from the windows of the Foreign Office across the immaculate acres of Horse Guards Parade. A column of Household Cavalry in impeccable order trotted across the gravel towards the Annexe and the Mall and on in the direction of Buckingham Palace.

It was a scene to delight and to impress. On many mornings Sir Jasper had stood at his window and gazed down from the ministry at this most English of English spectacles. Often it seemed to him that just to stand at this window and see the Blues ride by, the sun shine and the tourists crane, to hear across the square the clink of harness and bit, the snort of a mettled horse and the oooohs and aaahs of the hoi-polloi was worth all those years in embassies in other and lesser lands. It was rare for him that, watching this sight, he did not feel his shoulders square a little squarer, the stomach draw in a trifle under the striped trousers, and a touch of pride lift the chin to iron out the wrinkles of the neck. Sometimes, hearing the crunch of the hooves on gravel, he would rise from his desk just to stand at the neo-Gothic window and see them pass, before returning to the papers or the business of the state. And sometimes, thinking back on all those who had tried from across the sea to change this scene and supplant the jingle of the spurs with the tramp of brodequins from Paris or jackboots from Berlin, he felt a little pricking behind the eyes and would hurry back to his papers.

But not this morning. This morning he glowered down like an avenging acid drop and his lips were pressed so tightly together that, never full or rosy, they had disappeared completely. Sir Jasper Quigley was in a towering rage, and by a small sign here and there it showed. He was, of course, alone.

He was also the Head of France, not in the literal sense of possessing any jurisdiction over the country across the Channel towards friendship with whom so much lip-service had been paid and so little felt during his lifetime, but head of the bureau in the Foreign Office whose business it was to study the affairs, ambitions, activities and, often, conspiracies of that confounded place and then report upon them to the Permanent Under Secretary and, ultimately, to Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

He possessed, or he would not have got the appointment, all the essential requirements: a long and distinguished record of service in diplomacy elsewhere than France, a history of soundness in his political judgements which, although frequently wrong, were inevitably in accord with those of his superiors of the given moment; a fine record and one of which to be justly proud. He had never been publicly wrong, nor inconveniently right, never supported an unfashionable viewpoint nor proffered opinions out of line with those prevailing at the highest levels of the Corps.

A marriage to the virtually unmarriageable daughter of the Head of Chancery in Berlin, who had later become an Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of State, had done no harm. It had enabled an unfortunate memorandum in 1937 from Berlin advising that German rearmament would have no real effect in political terms on the future of Western Europe to be overlooked.

During the war, back in London, he had been for a while on the Balkan Desk, and had forcefully counselled British support for the Yugoslav partisan Mikailovitch and his Cetniks. When the Prime Minister of the time had unaccountably preferred to listen to the advice of an obscure young Captain called Fitzroy MacLean who had parachuted into the place and who advised backing a wretched Communist called Tito, young Quigley had been transferred to France Desk.

Here he had distinguished himself by becoming a leading advocate of British support for General Giraud in Algiers. It was, or would have been, a jolly good policy too, had it not been out-manoeuvred by that other and less senior French general who had been living in London all the while trying to put together a force called the Free French. Why Winston ever bothered with the man was something none of the professionals could ever understand.

Not that any of the French were much use, of course. No one could ever say of Sir Jasper (knighted in ’61 for his services to diplomacy) that he lacked the essential qualification for a good Head of France. He had a congenital dislike of France and everything to do with the place. These feelings had become, by the close of President de Gaulle’s press conference of January 14th, 1963, in which he barred Britain from the Common Market and caused Sir Jasper to have an uncomfortable twenty minutes with the Minister, as nothing compared to his feelings towards the person of the French President.

There was a tap on his door. Sir Jasper swung away from the window. From the blotter in front of him he picked up a piece of blue flimsy paper and held it as though he had been reading it when the knock came.

‘Enter.’

The younger man entered the office, closed the door behind him and approached the desk.

Sir Jasper glanced at him over the half-moon glasses.

‘Ah, Lloyd. Just looking at this report you filed during the night. Interesting, interesting. An unofficial request lodged by a senior French police detective to a senior British police officer. Passed on to a senior superintendent of the Special Branch, who sees fit to consult, unofficially of course, a junior member of the Intelligence Service. Mmm?’

‘Yes, Sir Jasper.’

Lloyd stared across at the spare figure of the diplomat standing by the window studying his report as if he had never seen it before. He had cottoned on at least that Sir Jasper was already well versed in the contents, and that the studied indifference was probably a pose.

‘And this junior officer sees fit, off his own bat and without reference to higher authority, to assist the Special Branch officer by passing on to him a suggestion. A suggestion, moreover, that without a shred of proof indicates that a British citizen thought to be a business man may in fact be a cold-blooded killer. Mmmmm?’

What the hell’s the old buzzard getting at? thought Lloyd.

He soon found out.

‘What intrigues me, my dear Lloyd, is that although this request, unofficial of course, is lodged yesterday morning, it is not until twenty-four hours later that the head of the department of the ministry most closely concerned with what happens in France gets to be informed. Rather an odd state of affairs, wouldn’t you say?’

Lloyd got the drift. Inter-departmental pique. But he was equally aware that Sir Jasper was a powerful man, versed over decades in the power struggle within the hierarchy into which its component members habitually put more effort than into state business.

‘With the greatest respect, Sir Jasper, Superintendent Thomas’ request to me, as you say an unofficial one, was made at nine last night. The report was filed at midnight.’

‘True, true. But I notice his request was also complied with before midnight. Now can you tell me why that was?’

‘I felt the request for guidance, or possible guidance as to a line of enquiry only, came within the scope of normal interdepartmental co-operation,’ replied Lloyd.

‘Did you now? Did you now?’ Sir Jasper had dropped the pose of mild enquiry and some of his pique was coming through. ‘But not apparently within the scope of interdepartmental co-operation between your service and the France Desk, mmm?’

‘You have my report in your hand, Sir Jasper.’

‘A bit late, sir. A bit late.’

Lloyd decided to riposte. He was aware that if he had committed any error in consulting higher authority before helping Thomas, it was his own chief he should have consulted, not Sir Jasper Quigley. And the head of the SIS was beloved by his staff and disliked by the mandarins of the FO for his refusal to allow anyone other than himself rebuke his subordinates.

‘Too late for what, Sir Jasper?’

Sir Jasper glanced up sharply. He was not going to fall into the trap of admitting it was too late to prevent the co-operation with Thomas’ request from being fulfilled.

‘You realise of course that a British citizen’s name is concerned here. A man against whom there is not a shred of evidence, let alone proof. Don’t you think it a rather odd procedure to bandy a man’s name and, in view of the nature of the request, reputation about in this manner?’

‘I hardly think divulging a man’s name to a superintendent of the Special Branch simply as a possible line of enquiry can be described as bandying it about, Sir Jasper.’

The diplomat found his lips were pressed hard together as he sought to control his rage. Impertinent pup, but astute too. Needed watching very carefully. He took a grip on himself.

‘I see, Lloyd. I see. In view of your evident desire to assist the Special Branch, a most laudable desire, of course, do you think it too much to expect you to consult a little before throwing yourself into the breach?’

‘Are you asking, Sir Jasper, why you were not consulted?’

Sir Jasper saw red.

‘Yes, sir, I am, sir. That is exactly what I am asking?’

‘Sir Jasper, with the greatest deference to your seniority, I feel I must draw your attention to the fact that I am on the staff of the Service. If you disagree with my course of conduct of last night I think it would be more seemly if your complaint went to my own superior officer rather than to me directly.’

Seemly? Seemly? Was this young upstart trying to tell a Head of France what was and was not seemly?

‘And it shall, sir,’ snapped Sir Jasper, ‘and it shall. In the strongest terms.’

Without asking for permission, Lloyd turned and left the office. He had few doubts that he was in for a roasting from the Old Man, and all he could say in mitigation was that Bryn Thomas’s request had seemed urgent, with time possibly a pressing matter. If the Old Man decided that the proper channels should have been gone through, then he, Lloyd, would have to take the rap. But at least he would take it from the OM and not from Quigley. Oh, damn Thomas.

However, Sir Jasper Quigley was very much in two minds whether to complain or not. Technically he was right, the information about Calthrop, although completely buried in long discarded files, should have been cleared with higher authority, but not necessarily with himself. As Head of France, he was one of the customers of SIS intelligence reporting, not one of the directors of it. He could complain to that cantankerous genius (not his choice of words) who ran the SIS and probably secure a good ticking off for Lloyd, possibly damage the brat’s career. But he might also get a dose of the rough edge of the SIS chief’s tongue for summoning an intelligence officer without asking his permission, and that thought did not amuse. Besides, the head of SIS was reputed to be extremely close to some of the men at the Very Top. Played cards with them at Blades; shot with them in Yorkshire. And the Glorious Twelfth was only a month away. He was still trying to get invited to some of those parties. Better leave it.

‘The damage is done now, anyway,’ he mused as he gazed out over Horseguards Parade.

‘The damage is done now anyway,’ he remarked to his luncheon guest at his club just after one o’clock. ‘I suppose they’ll go right ahead and co-operate with the French. Hope they don’t work too hard, what?’

It was a good joke and he enjoyed it very much. Unfortunately he had not fully estimated his lunch guest, who was also close to some of the men at the Very Top.

Almost simultaneously a personal report from the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police and news of Sir Jasper’s little bon mot reached the Prime Minister’s eyes and ears respectively just before four when he returned to 10 Downing Street after questions in the House.

At ten past four the phone in Superintendent Thomas’s office rang.

Thomas had spent the morning and most of the afternoon trying to track down a man about whom he knew nothing but the name. As usual when enquiring into a man of whom it was definitely known that he had been abroad, the Passport Office in Petty France had been the starting point.

A personal visit there when they opened at nine in the morning had elicited from them photostat copies of application forms for passports from six separate Charles Calthrops. Unfortunately they all had middle names, and all were different. He had also secured the submitted photographs of each man, on a promise that they would be copied and returned to the Passport Office’s archives.

One of the passports had been applied for since January 1961, but that did not necessarily mean anything, although it was significant that no records existed of a previous application by that Charles Calthrop before the one Thomas now possessed. If he had been using another name in Dominican Republic, how come the rumours that had later linked him with Trujillo’s killing had mentioned him as Calthrop? Thomas was inclined to downgrade this late applicant for a passport.

Of the other five, one seemed too old; he was sixty-five by the August of 1963. The remaining four were possibles. It did not matter whether they tallied with Lebel’s description of a tall blond, for Thomas’s job was one of elimination. If all six could be eliminated from suspicion of being the Jackal, so much the better. He could advise Lebel accordingly with a clear conscience.

Each application form had an address, two in London and two in the provinces. It was not enough simply to ring up, ask for Mr Charles Calthrop and then ask if the man had been in Dominican Republic in 1961. Even if he had been there, he might well deny it now.

Nor were any of the four top-listed suspects marked down as ‘business man’ in the space for professional status. That too was not conclusive. Lloyd’s report of a bar rumour at the time might call him a business man, but that could well be wrong.

During the morning the county and borough police, after a telephone request by Thomas, had traced the two provincial Calthrops. One was still at work, expecting to go on holiday with his family at the weekend. He was escorted home in the lunch-break and his passport was examined. It had no entry or exit visas or stamps for Dominican Republic in 1960 or 1961. It had only been used twice, once for Mallorca and once for the Costa Brava. Moreover, enquiries at his place of work had revealed that this particular Charles Calthrop had never left the accounts department of the soup factory where he worked during January 1961, and he had been on the staff for ten years.

The other outside London was traced to a hotel in Blackpool. Not having his passport on him, he was persuaded to authorise the police of his home town to borrow his house key off the next-door neighbour, go to the top drawer of his desk, and look at the passport. It too bore no Dominican police stamps, and at the man’s place of work it was found he was a typewriter repair mechanic who also had not left his place of work in 1961 except for his summer holidays. His insurance cards and attendance records showed that.

Of the two Charles Calthrops in London one was discovered to be a greengrocer in Catford who was selling vegetables in his shop when the two quiet-spoken men in suits came to talk to him. As he lived above his own shop he was able to produce his passport within a few minutes. Like the others it gave no indication that the possessor had ever been to Dominican Republic. When asked, the greengrocer convinced the detectives that he did not even know where that island was.

The fourth and last Calthrop was proving more difficult. The address given in his application form for a passport four years previously was visited and turned out to be a block of flats in Highgate. The estate agents managing the block searched their records and revealed that he had left that address in December 1960. No forwarding address was known.

But at least Thomas knew his middle name. A search of the telephone directory revealed nothing, but using the authority of Special Branch Thomas learned from the General Post Office that one C. H. Calthrop had an ex-directory number in West London. The initials tallied with the names of the missing Calthrop—Charles Harold. From there Thomas checked with the registration department of the borough in which the telephone number was listed.

Yes, the voice from the borough hall told him, a Mr Charles Harold Calthrop was indeed the tenant of the flat at that address, and was listed on the electoral roll as a voter of that borough.

At this point a visit was made to the flat. It was locked and there was no reply to the repeated rings on the bell. Nobody else in the block seemed to know where Mr Calthrop was. When the squad car returned to Scotland Yard, Superintendent Thomas tried a new tack. The Inland Revenue was asked to check their records for the tax returns of one Charles Harold Calthrop, private address given. Particular point of interest—who employed him, and who had been employing him over the past three years?

It was at this point that the phone rang. Thomas picked it up, identified himself, and listened for a few seconds. His eyebrows lifted.

‘Me?’ he asked, ‘what, personally? Yes, of course, I’ll come over. Give me five minutes? Fine, see you.’

He left the building and walked across to Parliament Square, blowing his nose noisily to clear the blocked sinuses. Far from getting better, his cold seemed to be worse, despite the warm summer day.

From Parliament Square he headed up Whitehall and took the first left into Downing Street. As usual it was dark and gloomy, the sun never penetrating to the inconspicuous cul-de-sac that contains the residence of the Prime Ministers of Britain. There was a small crowd in front of the door of No. 10, kept on the far side of the road by two stolid policemen, perhaps just watching the stream of messengers arriving at the door with buff envelopes to deliver, perhaps hoping to catch a glimpse of an important visage at one of the windows.

Thomas left the roadway and cut to the right across a small courtyard enclosing a little lawn. His walk brought him to the back entrance of No. 10 where he pressed the buzzer beside the door. It opened immediately to reveal a large uniformed police sergeant, who recognised him at once and saluted.

‘ ’Afternoon, sir. Mr Harrowby asked me to show you to his room directly.’

James Harrowby, the man who had telephoned Thomas in his office a few minutes before, was the Prime Minister’s personal security chief, a handsome man looking younger than his forty-one years. He wore a public-school tie, but had a brilliant career as a policeman behind him before he was transferred to Downing Street. Like Thomas, he had the rank of a superintendent. He rose as Thomas entered.

‘Come in, Bryn. Nice to see you.’ He nodded to the sergeant. ‘Thank you, Chalmers.’ The sergeant withdrew and closed the door.

‘What’s it all about?’ asked Thomas. Harrowby looked at him with surprise.

‘I was hoping you could tell me. He just rang fifteen minutes ago, mentioned you by name and said he wanted to see you personally and at once. Have you been up to something?’

Thomas could only think of one thing he had been up to, but he was surprised it had got so high in such a short time. Still, if the PM did not wish to take his own security man into his confidence for once, that was his business.

‘Not that I know of,’ he said.

Harrowby lifted the telephone on his desk and asked for the Prime Minister’s private office. The line crackled and a voice said ‘Yes?’

‘Harrowby here, Prime Minister. Superintendent Thomas is with me … yes, sir. Right away.’ He replaced the receiver.

‘Straight in. Almost on the double. You must have been up to something. There are two Ministers waiting. Come on.’

Harrowby led the way out of his office and down a corridor towards a green baize door at the far end. A male secretary was coming out, saw the pair of them and stepped back, holding the door open. Harrowby ushered Thomas inside, said clearly, ‘Superintendent Thomas, Prime Minister,’ and withdrew, closing the door quietly behind him.

Thomas was aware of being in a very quiet room, high-ceilinged and elegantly furnished, untidy with books and papers, of a smell of pipe tobacco and wood-panelling, a room more like the study of a university don than the office of a Prime Minister.

The figure at the window turned round.

‘Good afternoon, Superintendent. Please sit down.’

‘Good afternoon, sir.’ He chose an upright chair facing the desk and perched on the edge of it. He had never had occasion to see the Prime Minister that close before, nor ever in private. He got the impression of a pair of sad, almost beaten, eyes, drooping lids, like a bloodhound who has run a long race and taken little joy from it.

There was silence in the room as the Prime Minister walked to his desk and sat behind it. Thomas had heard the rumours round Whitehall, of course, that the PM’s health was not all it might be, and of the toll taken by the strain of bringing the Government through the rottenness of the Keeler/Ward affair, which had even then only just ended and was still number one talking point throughout the land. Even so, he was surprised at the look of exhaustion and sadness in the man opposite him.

‘Superintendent Thomas, it has come to my attention that you are presently conducting an investigation based on a request for assistance telephoned from Paris yesterday morning by a senior detective of the French Police Judiciaire.’

‘Yes, sir … Prime Minister.’

‘And that this request stems from a fear among the French security authorities that a man may be on the loose … a professional assassin, hired, presumably by the OAS, to undertake a mission in France at some future time?’

‘That was not actually explained to us, Prime Minister. The request was for suggestions as to the identity of any such professional assassin who might be known to us. There was no explanation as to why they wanted such suggestions.’

‘Nevertheless, what do you deduce from the fact that such a request was made, Superintendent?’

Thomas shrugged slightly.

‘The same as yourself, Prime Minister.’

‘Precisely. One does not need to be a genius to be able to deduce the only possible reason for the French authorities wishing to identify such a … specimen. And what would you deduce to be the eventual target of such a man, if indeed a man of this type has come to the attention of the French police?’

‘Well, Prime Minister, I suppose they fear an assassin has been engaged to attempt to kill the President.’

‘Precisely. Not the first time such an attempt would have been made?’

‘No, sir. There have been six attempts already.’

The Prime Minister stared at the papers in front of him as if they might give him some clue as to what had happened to the world in the closing months of his premiership.

‘Are you aware, Superintendent, that there apparently exist some persons in this country, persons occupying not obscure positions of authority, who would not be distressed if your investigations were to be less energetic than possible?’

Thomas was genuinely surprised.

‘No, sir.’ Where on earth had the PM got that titbit from?

‘Would you please give me a résumé of the state of your enquiries up to the present time?’

Thomas began at the beginning, explaining clearly and concisely the trail from Criminal Records to Special Branch, the conversation with Lloyd, the mention of a man called Calthrop, and the investigations that had taken place up to that moment.

When he had finished the Prime Minister rose and walked to the window, which gave on to the sunlit square of grass in the courtyard. For long minutes he stared down into the courtyard and there was a sag to the set of the shoulders. Thomas wondered what he was thinking.

Perhaps he was thinking of a beach outside Algiers where he had once walked and talked with the haughty Frenchman who now sat in another office three hundred miles away, governing the affairs of his own country. They had both been twenty years younger then, and a lot of things had not happened that were to come later, and a lot of things had not come between them.

Maybe he was thinking of the same Frenchman sitting in the gilded hall of the Elysée Palace eight months earlier destroying in measured and sonorous phrases the hopes of the British Premier of crowning his political career by bringing Britain into the European Community before retiring into the contentment of a man who has fulfilled his dream.

Or possibly he was just thinking of the past agonising months when the revelations of a pimp and a courtesan had almost brought down the Government of Britain. He was an old man, who had been born and brought up in a world that had its standards, for good or evil, and had believed in those standards and had followed them. Now the world was a different place, full of a new people with new ideas, and he was of the past. Did he understand that there were new standards now, which he could dimly recognise and did not like?

Probably he knew, looking down on to the sunny grass, what lay ahead. The surgical operation could not long be delayed, and with it retirement from the leadership. Before long the world would be handed over to the new people. Much of the world had already been handed over to them. But would it also be handed over to pimps and tarts, spies and … assassins?

From behind, Thomas saw the shoulders straighten, and the old man in front of him turned round.

‘Superintendent Thomas, I wish you to know that General de Gaulle is my friend. If there is the remotest danger to his person, and if that danger could emanate from a citizen of these islands, then that person must be stopped. From now on you will conduct your investigations with unprecedented vigour. Within the hour your superiors will be authorised by me personally to accord you every facility within their powers. You will be subjected to no limits in either expenditure or manpower. You will have the authority to co-opt on to your team whomsoever you wish to assist you, and to have access to the official documentation of any department in the land which may be able to further your enquiries. You will, by my personal order, co-operate without any hint of reserve with the French authorities in this matter. Only when you are absolutely satisfied that whoever this man may be whom the French are seeking to identify and arrest, he is not a British subject, nor operating from these shores, may you desist from your enquiries. At that point you will report back to me in person.

‘In the event that this man Calthrop, or any other man bearing a British passport, may reasonably be considered to be the man whom the French are seeking, you will detain this man. Whoever he is, he must be stopped. Do I make myself clear?’

It could not have been clearer. Thomas knew for certain that some piece of information had come to the PM’s ears that had sparked off the instructions he had just given. Thomas suspected it had to do with the cryptic remark about certain persons who wished his investigations to make little progress. But he could not be sure.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

The PM inclined his head to indicate the interview was over. Thomas rose and went to the door.

‘Er … Prime Minister.’

‘Yes.’

‘There is one point, sir. I am not certain whether you would wish me to tell the French yet about the enquiries into the rumour about this man Calthrop in Dominican Republic two years ago.’

‘Do you have reasonable grounds to believe as of now that this man’s past activities justify fitting him to the description of the man the French wish to identify?’

‘No, Prime Minister. We have nothing against any Charles Calthrop in the world except the rumour of two years ago. We do not yet know whether the Calthrop we have spent the afternoon trying to trace is the one who was in the Caribbean in January 1961. If he is not, then we are back to square one.’

The Prime Minister thought for a few seconds.

‘I would not wish you to waste your French colleague’s time with suggestions based on unsubstantiated rumours two and a half years old. Note the word “unsubstantiated”, Superintendent. Please continue your enquiries with energy. At the moment you feel there is enough information in your possession concerning this, or any other, Charles Calthrop, to add substance to the rumour that he was involved in the affair of General Trujillo, you will inform the French at once and at the same time track the man down, wherever he is.’

‘Yes, Prime Minister.’

‘And would you please ask Mr Harrowby to come to me. I shall issue the authorities you need at once.’

Back in Thomas’s office things changed quickly through the rest of the afternoon. Round him he grouped a task force of six of the Special Branch’s best detective inspectors. One was recalled from leave; two were taken off their duties watching the house of a man suspected to be passing classified information obtained from the Royal Ordnance Factory where he worked to an East European military attaché. Two of the others were the ones who had helped him the day before go through the records of the Special Branch looking for a killer who had no name. The last had been on his day off, and was gardening in his greenhouse when the call came through to report to the Branch headquarters immediately.

He briefed them all exhaustively, swore them to silence, and answered a continuous stream of phone calls. It was just after 6 pm when the Inland Revenue found the tax returns of Charles Harold Calthrop. One of the detectives was sent out to bring the whole file back. The rest went to work on the telephone, except one who was sent to Calthrop’s address to seek out every neighbour and local tradesman for information as to where the man might be. Photographs taken from the one submitted by Calthrop on his application form for a passport four years previously were printed in the photographic laboratory, and every inspector had one in his pocket.

The tax returns of the wanted man showed that for the past year he had been unemployed, and before that had been abroad for a year. But for most of the financial year 1960-1 he had been in the employ of a firm whose name Thomas recognised as belonging to one of Britain’s leading manufacturers and exporters of small arms. Within an hour he had the name of the firm’s managing director, and found the man at home at his country house in the stockbroker belt of Surrey. By telephone Thomas made an appointment to see him immediately, and as dusk descended on the Thames his police Jaguar roared over the river in the direction of the village of Virginia Water.

Patrick Monson hardly looked like a dealer in lethal weapons but then, Thomas reflected, they never do. From Monson, Thomas learned the arms firm had employed Calthrop for just under a year. More important, during December 1960 and January 1961 he had been sent by the firm to Cuidad Trujillo to try and sell a consignment of British Army surplus submachine guns to Trujillo’s police chief.

Thomas eyed Monson with distaste.

And never mind what they later get used for, eh, boyo, he thought, but did not bother to voice his distaste. Why had Calthrop left Dominican Republic in such a hurry?

Monson seemed surprised by the question. Well, because Trujillo had been killed, of course. The whole regime fell within hours. What could be expected from the new regime by a man who had come to the island to sell the old regime a load of guns and ammunition? Of course he’d had to get out.

Thomas pondered. Certainly it made sense. Monson said Calthrop had later claimed he was actually sitting in the office of the dictator’s police chief discussing the sale when the news came through that the General had been killed in an ambush outside the town. The Chief of Police had gone white, and left immediately for his private estate where his aircraft and pilot were permanently waiting for him. Within a few hours mobs were rampaging through the streets seeking adherents of the old regime. Calthrop had to bribe a fisherman to sail him out of the island.

Why, Thomas asked eventually, did Calthrop leave the firm? He was dismissed, was the answer. Why? Monson thought carefully for a few moments. Finally he said:

‘Superintendent, the second-hand arms business is highly competitive. Cut-throat, you might say. To know what another man is offering for sale, and the price he is asking, can be vital for a rival wishing to clinch the same deal with the same buyer. Let us just say that we were not entirely satisfied with Calthrop’s loyalty to the company.’

In the car back into town Thomas thought over what Monson had told him. Calthrop’s explanation at the time as to why he had got out of Dominican Republic so fast was logical. It did not corroborate, indeed it tended to negate, the rumour subsequently reported by the Caribbean SIS resident that his name was linked with the killing.

On the other hand, according to Monson, Calthrop was a man who was not above playing a double cross. Could he have arrived as the accredited representative of a small-arms company wishing to make a sale, and at the same time have been in the pay of the revolutionaries?

There was one thing Monson had said that disturbed Thomas; he had mentioned that Calthrop did not know much about rifles when he joined the company. Surely a crack shot would be an expert? But then of course he could have learned that while with the company. But if he was a newcomer to rifle-shooting, why did the anti-Trujillo partisans want to hire him to stop the General’s car on a fast road with a single shot? Or did they not hire him at all? Was Calthrop’s own story the literal truth?

Thomas shrugged. It didn’t prove anything, nor disprove anything. Back to square one again, he thought bitterly.

But back at the office there was news that changed his mind. The inspector who had been enquiring at Calthrop’s address had reported in. He had found a next-door neighbour who had been out at work all day. The woman said Mr Calthrop had left some days before and had mentioned he was going touring in Scotland. In the back of the car parked in the street outside the woman had seen what looked like a set of fishing rods.

Fishing rods? Superintendent Thomas felt suddenly chilly, although the office was warm. As the detective finished talking one of the others came in.

‘Super?’

‘Yes?’

‘Something had just occurred to me.’

‘Go on.’

‘Do you speak French?’

‘No, do you?’

‘Yes, my mother was French. This assassin the PJ are looking for, he’s got the code-name Jackal, right?’

‘So what?’

‘Well, Jackal in French is Chacal. C-H-A-C-A-L. See? It could just be a coincidence. He must be as thick as five posts to pick a name, even in French, that’s made up of the first three letters of his Christian name and the first three letters of his …’

‘Land of my bloody fathers,’ said Thomas, and sneezed violently. Then he reached for the telephone.

15

THE THIRD MEETING in the Interior Ministry in Paris began shortly after ten o’clock, due to the lateness of the Minister who had been held up in the traffic on his way back from a diplomatic reception. As soon as he was seated, he gestured for the meeting to start.

The first report was from General Guibaud of the SDECE. It was short and to the point. The ex-Nazi killer, Kassel, had been located by agents of the Madrid office of the Secret Service. He was living quietly in retirement at his roof-top flat in Madrid, had become a partner with another former SS-commando leader in a prosperous business in the city, and so far as could be determined was not involved with the OAS. The Madrid office had in any case had a file on the man by the time the request from Paris for a further check came through, and was of the view that he had never been involved with the OAS at all.

In view of his age, increasingly frequent bouts of rheumatism that were beginning to affect his legs, and a remarkably high alcohol intake, Kassel, in the general view, could be discounted as a possible Jackal.

As the General finished, eyes turned to Commissaire Lebel. His report was sombre. During the course of the day reports had come into the PJ from the other three countries who had originally suggested possible suspects twenty-four hours earlier.

From America had come news that Chuck Arnold, the gun salesman, was in Columbia trying to clinch a deal for his American employer to sell a consignment of ex-US Army surplus AR-10 assault rifles to the Chief of Staff. He was in any case under permanent CIA surveillance while in Bogota, and there was no indication that he was planning anything other than to put through his arms deal, despite official US disapproval.

The file on this man had, however, been telexed to Paris, as had also the file on Vitellino. This showed that although the former Cosa Nostra gunman had not yet been located, he was five feet four inches tall, immensely broad and squat, with jet-black hair and a swarthy complexion. In view of the radical difference in appearance from the Jackal as described by the hotel clerk in Vienna, Lebel felt he too could be discounted.

The South Africans had learned Piet Schuyper was now the head of a private army of a diamond-mining corporation in a West African country of the British Commonwealth. His duties were to patrol the borders of the vast mining concessions owned by the company and ensure a continuous disincentive to illicit diamond poachers from across the border. No inconvenient questions were asked of him as to the methods he used to discourage poaching, and his employers were pleased with his efforts. His presence was confirmed by his employers; he was definitely at his post in West Africa.

The Belgian police had checked on their ex-mercenary. A report in the files from one of their Caribbean embassies had been unearthed, which reported the former employee of Katanga had been killed in a bar fight in Guatemala three months previously.

Lebel finished reading the last of the reports from the file in front of him. When he looked up it was to find fourteen pairs of eyes on him, most of them cold and challenging.

‘Alors, rien?’

The question from Colonel Rolland was that of everyone present.

‘No, nothing, I’m afraid,’ agreed Lebel. ‘None of the suggestions seem to stand up.’

‘Seem to stand up,’ echoed Saint-Clair bitterly, ‘is that what we have come to with your “pure detective work”? Nothing seems to stand up?’ He glared angrily at the two detectives, Bouvier and Lebel, quickly aware that the mood of the room was with him.

‘It would seem, gentlemen,’ the Minister quietly used the plural form to take in both the police commissaires, ‘that we are back where we started. Square one, so to speak?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ replied Lebel. Bouvier took up the cudgels on his behalf.

‘My colleague is searching, virtually without clues and without any sort of lead, for one of the most elusive types of men in the world. Such specimens do not advertise their professions or their whereabouts.’

‘We are aware of that, my dear commissaire,’ retorted the Minister, coldly, ‘the question is …’

He was interrupted by a knock on the door. The Minister frowned; his instructions had been that they were not to be disturbed except in an emergency.

‘Come in.’

One of the ministry’s porters stood in the doorway, diffident and abashed.

‘Mes excuses, Monsieur le Ministre. A telephone call for Commissaire Lebel. From London.’ Feeling the hostility of the room, the man tried to cover himself. ‘They say it is urgent …’

Lebel rose.

‘Would you excuse me, gentlemen?’

He returned in five minutes. The atmosphere was as cold as when he had left it, and evidently the wrangle over what to do next had continued in his absence. As he entered he interrupted a bitter denunciation from Colonel Saint-Clair, who tailed off as Lebel took his seat. The little commissaire had an envelope in his hand with scribbled writing on the back.

‘I think, gentlemen, we have the name of the man we are looking for,’ he began.

The meeting ended thirty minutes later almost in a mood of levity. When Lebel had finished his relation of the message from London, the men round the table had let out a collective sigh, like a train arriving at its platform after a long journey. Each man knew that at last there was something he could do. Within half an hour they had agreed that without a word of publicity it would be possible to scour France for a man in the name of Charles Calthrop, to find him and, if deemed necessary, to dispose of him.

The fullest known details of Calthrop, they knew, would not be available until the morning, when they would be telexed from London. But in the meantime Renseignements Généraux could check their miles of shelves for a disembarkation card filled in by this man, for a hotel card registering him at a hotel anywhere in France. The Prefecture of Police could check its own records to see if he was staying at any hotel within the confines of Paris.

The DST could put his name and description into the hands of every border post, port, harbour and airfield in France, with instructions that such a man was to be held immediately on his touching on French territory.

If he had not yet arrived in France, no matter. Complete silence would be maintained until he arrived, and when he did, they would have him.

‘This odious creature, the man they call Calthrop, we have him already in the bag,’ Colonel Raoul Saint-Clair de Villauban told his mistress that night as they lay in bed.

When Jacqueline finally coaxed a belated orgasm from the Colonel to send him to sleep the mantlepiece clock chimed twelve and it had become August 14th.

Superintendent Thomas sat back in his office chair and surveyed the six inspectors whom he had regrouped from their various tasks after putting down the phone following the call to Paris. Outside in the still summer night Big Ben tolled midnight.

His briefing took an hour. One man was allocated to examine Calthrop’s youth, where his parents now lived, if indeed he had any; where he had been to school; shooting record, if any, in the cadet corps as a schoolboy. Noticeable characteristics, distinguishing marks, etc.

A second was designated to investigate his young manhood, from school leaving, through National Service, record of service and prowess at shooting, employment following discharge from the Army, right up to the time he left the employ of the arms dealers who had dismissed him for suspected double-dealing.

The third and fourth detectives were put on the trail of his activities since leaving his last known employers in October 1961. Where had he been, whom had he seen, what had been his income, from what sources; since there was no police record and therefore presumably no fingerprints, Thomas needed every known and latest photograph of the man, up to the present time.

The last two inspectors were to seek to establish the whereabouts of Calthrop at that moment. Go over the entire flat for fingerprints, find where he bought the car, check at County Hall, London, for records of issue of a driving licence, and if there were none start checking with the provincial county licensing departments. Trace the car, make, age and colour, registration number. Trace his local garage to see if he was planning a long journey by car, check the cross-Channel ferries, go round all the airline companies for a booking on a plane, no matter what the destination.

All six men took extensive notes. Only when he had finished did they rise and file out of the office. In the corridor the last two eyed each other askance.

‘Dry-clean and re-texture,’ said one. ‘The complete bloody works.’

‘The funny thing is,’ observed the other, ‘that the old man won’t tell us what he’s supposed to have done, or be going to do.’

‘One thing we can be sure of. To get this kind of action, it must have come down right from the top. You’d think the bugger was planning to shoot the King of Siam.’

It took a short while to wake up a magistrate and get him to sign a search warrant. By the small hours of the morning, while an exhausted Thomas dozed in the armchair of his office and an even more haggard Claude Lebel sipped strong black coffee in his office, two Special Branch men went through Calthrop’s flat with a fine tooth comb.

Both were experts. They started with the drawers, emptying each one systematically into a bedsheet and sorting the contents diligently. When all the drawers were clean, they started on the woodwork of the drawerless desk for secret panels. After the wooden furniture came the upholstered pieces. When they had finished with these the flat looked like a turkey farm on Thanksgiving Day. One man was working over the drawing room, the other the bedroom. After these two came the kitchen and bathroom.

With the furniture, cushions, pillows and coats and suits in the cupboards dealt with, they started on the floors, ceilings and walls. By six in the morning the flat was as clean as a whistle. Most of the neighbours were grouped on the landing looking at each other and then the closed door of Calthrop’s flat, conversing in whispers that hushed when the two inspectors emerged from the flat.

One was carrying a suitcase stuffed with Calthrop’s personal papers, and private belongings. He went down to the street, jumped into the waiting squad car and drove back to Superintendent Thomas. The other started on the long round of interviews. He began with the neighbours, aware that most would have to head for their places of work within an hour or two. The local tradesmen could come later.

Thomas spent several minutes riffling through the collection of possessions spread all over his office floor. Out of the jumble the detective inspector grabbed a small blue book, walked to the window and started to flick through it by the light of the rising sun.

‘Super, have a look at this.’ His finger jabbed at one of the pages in the passport in front of him. ‘See … “Republica de Dominica, Aeroporto Ciudad Trujillo, Decembre 1960, Entrada …” He was there all right. This is our man.’

Thomas took the passport from him, glanced at it for a moment, then stared out of the window.

‘Oh yes, this is our man, boyo. But does it not occur to you that we’re holding his passport in our hands?’

‘Oh, the sod …’ breathed the inspector when he saw the point.

‘As you say,’ said Thomas, whose chapel upbringing caused him only very occasionally to use strong language. ‘If he’s not travelling on this passport, then what is he travelling on? Give me the phone, and get me Paris.’

By the same hour the Jackal had already been on the road for fifty minutes and the city of Milan lay far behind him. The hood of the Alfa was down and the morning sun already bathed the Autostrada 7 from Milan to Genoa. Along the wide straight road he pushed the car well over eighty miles an hour and kept the tachometre needle flickering just below the start of the red band. The cool wind lashed his pale hair into a frenzy around the forehead, but the eyes were protected by the dark glasses.

The road map said it was two hundred and ten kilometres to the French frontier at Ventimiglia, about a hundred and thirty miles, and he was well up on his estimated driving time of two hours. There was a slight hold-up among the lorry traffic of Genoa as it headed for the docks just after seven o’clock, but before 7.15 he was away on the A.10 to San Remo and the border.

The daily road traffic was already thick when he arrived at ten to eight at the sleepiest of France’s frontier points, and the heat was rising.

After a thirty-minute wait in the queue he was beckoned up to the parking ramp for Customs examination. The policeman who took his passport examined it carefully, muttered a brief ‘Un moment, monsieur’ and disappeared inside the Customs shed.

He emerged a few minutes later with a man in civilian clothes who held the passport.

‘Bonjour, monsieur.’

‘Bonjour.’

‘This is your passport?’

‘Yes.’

There was another searching examination of the passport.

‘What is the purpose of your visit to France?’

‘Tourism. I have never seen the Côte d’Azur.’

‘I see. The car is yours?’

‘No. It’s a hired car. I had business in Italy, and it has unexpectedly occasioned a week with nothing to do before returning to Milan. So I hired a car to do a little touring.’

‘I see. You have the papers for the car?’

The Jackal extended the international driving licence, the contract of hire, and the two insurance certificates. The plain-clothes man examined both.

‘You have luggage, monsieur?’

‘Yes, three pieces in the boot, and a hand-grip.’

‘Please bring them all into the Customs hall.’

He walked away. The policeman helped the Jackal off-load the three suitcases and the hand-grip, and together they carried them to Customs.

Before leaving Milan he had taken the old greatcoat, scruffy trousers and shoes of André Martin, the non-existent Frenchman whose papers were sewn into the lining of the third suitcase, and rolled them in a ball at the back of the boot. The clothes from the other two suitcases had been divided between the three. The medals were in his pocket.

Two Customs officers examined each case. While they were doing so he filled in the standard form for tourists entering France. Nothing in the cases excited any attention. There was a brief moment of anxiety as the Customs men picked up the jars containing the hair-tinting dyes. He had taken the precaution of emptying them into after-shave flasks, previously emptied. At that time after-shave lotion was not in vogue in France, it was too new on the market and mainly confined to America. He saw the two Customs men exchange glances, but they replaced the flasks in the hand-grip.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see through the windows another man examining the boot and engine bonnet of the Alfa. Fortunately he did not look underneath. He unrolled the greatcoat and trousers in the boot and looked at them with distaste, but presumed the coat was for covering the bonnet on winter nights and old clothes were a contingency in case repairs had to be done on the car along the road. He replaced the clothes and closed the boot.

As the Jackal finished filling in his form, the two Customs men inside the shed closed the cases and nodded to the plain-clothes man. He in turn took the entry card, examined it, checked it again with the passport, and handed the passport back.

‘Merci, monsieur. Bon voyage.’

Ten minutes later the Alfa was booming into the eastern outskirts of Menton. After a relaxed breakfast at a café overlooking the old port and yacht basin, the Jackal headed along the Corniche Littorale for Monaco, Nice and Cannes.

In his London office Superintendent Thomas stirred a cup of thick black coffee and ran a hand over his stubbled chin. Across the room the two inspectors saddled with the task of finding the whereabouts of Calthrop faced their chief. The three were waiting for the arrival of six extra men, all sergeants of the Special Branch released from their routine duties as the result of a string of telephone calls Thomas had been making over the previous hour.

Shortly after nine, as they reported to their offices and learned of their re-deployment to Thomas’s force, the men started to trickle in. When the last had arrived he briefed them.

‘All right, we’re looking for a man. There’s no need for me to tell you why we want him, it’s not important that you should know. What is important is that we get him, and get him fast. Now we know, or think we know, that he’s abroad at this moment. We are pretty certain he is travelling under a false passport.

‘Here …’ he passed out among them a set of photographs, blown-up copies of the portrait photo on Calthrop’s passport application form … ‘is what he looks like. The chances are he will have disguised himself and therefore not necessarily respond to that description. What you are going to have to do is go down to the Passport Office and get a complete list of every application for a passport made recently. Start by covering the last fifty days. If that yields nothing, go back another fifty days. It’s going to a be a hard grind.’

He continued by giving a rough description of the most common way of getting a false passport, which was in fact the method the Jackal had used.

‘The important thing is,’ he concluded, ‘not to be content with birth certificates. Check the death certificates. So after you’ve got the list from Passport Office, take the whole operation down to Somerset House, get settled in, divide the list of names among yourselves, and get to work among those death certificates. If you can find one application for a passport submitted by a man who isn’t alive any longer, the impostor will probably be our man. Off you go.’

The eight men filed out, while Thomas got on to the Passport Office by phone, then the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths at Somerset House, to ensure that his team would get the fullest co-operation.

It was two hours later as he was shaving on a borrowed electric razor plugged into his desk lamp that the senior of the two inspectors, who was the leader of the team, phoned back. There were, he said, eight thousand and forty-one applications for new passports submitted in the previous hundred days. It was the summer, he explained, holiday time. There were always more in holiday time.

Bryn Thomas hung up and snuffled into his handkerchief.

‘Damn summer,’ he said.

Just after eleven that morning the Jackal rolled into the centre of Cannes. As usual when he wanted something done, he looked for one of the best hotels, and after a few minutes’ cruising swept into the forecourt of the Majestic. Running a comb through his hair, he strode into the foyer.

Being the middle of the morning, most of the guests were out and the hall was not busy. His elegant light suit and confident manner picked him out as an English gentleman and raised no eyebrows when he asked a bell-hop where the telephone booths were. The lady behind the counter that separated the switchboard from the entry to the cloakrooms looked up as he approached.

‘Please get me Paris, MOLITOR 5901,’ he asked.

A few minutes later she gestured him to a booth beside the switchboard and watched him close the sound-proof door behind him.

‘Alio, ici Chacal.’

‘Alio, ici Valmy. Thank God you’ve rung. We’ve been trying to get hold of you for two days.’

Anyone looking through the glass panel of the booth’s door would have seen the Englishman inside stiffen and frown at the mouthpiece. For most of the ten-minute conversation he remained silent, listening. Occasionally his lips moved as he asked a short, terse question. But nobody was looking; the switchboard operator was busy in a romantic novel. The next thing she saw was the guest towering over her, the dark glasses staring down. From the meter on the switchboard she read off the charge for the call, and was paid.

The Jackal took a pot of coffee on the terrace looking over the Croisette and the glittering sea where brown bathers romped and screamed. Deep in thought, he drew heavily on a cigarette.

The bit about Kowalski he could follow; he remembered the hulking Pole from the hotel in Vienna. What he could not follow was how the bodyguard outside the door had known his code-name, or what he had been hired to do. Perhaps the French police had worked that out for themselves. Perhaps Kowalski had sensed what he was, for he also had been a killer, but oafish and clumsy.

The Jackal took stock. Valmy had advised him to quit and go home, but had admitted he had no direct authority from Rodin to cancel the operation. What had happened confirmed the Jackal’s intense suspicions of the security slackness of the OAS. But he knew something that they did not; and something that the French police could not know. It was that he was travelling under an assumed name with a legitimate passport in that name, and three separate sets of false papers, including two foreign passports and disguises to match, up his sleeve.

Just what did the French police, this man Valmy had mentioned, Commissaire Lebel, have to go on? A rough description, tall, blond, foreign. There must be thousands of such men staying in France in August. They could not arrest every one.

The second advantage he had was that the French police were hunting for a man carrying the passport of Charles Calthrop. Then let them, and good luck. He was Alexander Duggan, and could prove it.

From here on, with Kowalski dead, nobody, not even Rodin and his henchmen, knew who he was or where. He was on his own at last, and that was the way he had always wanted it to be.

Nevertheless, the dangers had increased, there was no doubt of it. With the idea of an assassination once revealed, he would be attacking a fortress of security that was on its guard. The question was: could his plan for carrying out the killing beat the security screen. On balance, he was confident that it could. The question still remained, and it had to be answered. To go back, or to go on? To go back would be to enter into dispute with Rodin and his bunch of thugs over the ownership of the quarter million dollars presently in his account in Zürich. If he refused to hand the bulk of it back they would not hesitate to track him down, torture him for the signed paper that would release the money from the account, then kill him. To stay ahead of them would cost money, a lot of it, probably the full extent of the money he possessed.

To go on would mean further dangers until the job was over. It would become ever harder to pull back at the last minute as the day approached.

The bill came, he glanced at it and winced. God, the prices these people charged! To live this kind of life a man needed to be rich, to have dollars, and dollars and even more dollars. He looked out at the jewelled sea and the lithe brown girls walking along the beach, the hissing Cadillacs and snarling Jaguars that crept along the Croisette, their bronzed young drivers keeping half an eye on the road and the other flicking across the pavements for a likely pick-up. This was what he had wanted for a long time, from the days when he had pressed his nose to the travel agent’s windows and gazed at the posters showing another life, another world, far from the drudgery of the commuter train and the forms in triplicate, the paper clips and tepid tea. Over the past three years he had almost made it; a glimpse here, a touch there. He had got used to good clothes, expensive meals, a smart flat, a sports car, elegant women. To go back meant to give it all up.

The Jackal paid the bill and left a large tip. He climbed into the Alfa and headed away from the Majestic and into the heart of France.

Commissaire Lebel was sitting at his desk, feeling as though he had never slept in his life and probably never would again. In the corner Lucien Caron snored loudly on the camp-bed, having been up all night masterminding the search through the records for Charles Calthrop somewhere on the face of France. Lebel had taken over at dawn.

In front of him now was a growing pile of reports from the various agencies whose task it was to keep check on the presence and whereabouts of foreigners in France. Each one bore the same message. No man of that name had crossed any border point legally since the start of the year, the farthest back the checks had extended. No hotel in the country, either in the provinces or Paris, had taken in a guest of that name, at least, not under that name. He was not on any list of undesirable aliens, nor had he ever come to the notice of the French authorities in any way.

As each report came in, Lebel wearily told the informant to go on checking further and further back until any visit Calthrop had ever paid to France could be traced. From that, possibly, could be established whether he had a habitual place of residence, a friend’s house, a favourite hotel, where he might even now be masquerading under an assumed name.

Superintendent Thomas’s call of that morning had come as yet another blow to hopes of an early capture of the elusive killer. Once again the phrase ‘back to square one’ had been used, but fortunately this time it was only between Caron and himself. The members of the evening council had not yet been informed that the Calthrop lead was probably going to prove abortive. This was something he was going to have to tell them that evening at ten o’clock. If he could not produce an alternative name to Calthrop, he could imagine once again the scorn of Saint-Clair and the silent reproach of the rest.

Two things only could comfort him. One was that at least they now had a description of Calthrop and a photograph of his head and shoulders, full-face to the camera. He had probably changed his appearance considerably if he had taken a false passport, but still, it was better than nothing. The other thing was that no one else on the council could think of anything better to do than what he was doing—check everything.

Caron had put forward the idea that perhaps the British police had surprised Calthrop while he was away from his flat on an errand in the town; that he had no alternative passport; that he had gone to ground and cried off on the whole operation.

Lebel had sighed.

‘That would indeed be lucky,’ he told his adjutant, ‘but don’t count on it. The British Special Branch reported that all his washing things and shaving tackle were missing from the bathroom, and that he had mentioned to a neighbour that he was going away touring and fishing. If Calthrop left his passport behind, it was because he no longer needed it. Don’t count on this man making too many errors; I’m beginning to get a feeling about the Jackal.’

The man the police of two countries were now searching for had decided to avoid the agonising congestion of the Grande Corniche on its murderous way from Cannes to Marseilles, and to stay away from the southern part of the RN7 when it turned north out of Marseilles for Paris. Both roads in August he knew to be a refined form of hell on earth.

Safe in his assumed and documented name of Duggan, he decided to drive leisurely up from the coast through the Alpes Maritimes where the air was cooler in the altitude, and on through the rolling hills of Burgundy. He was in no particular hurry, for the day he had set for his kill was not yet on him, and he knew he had arrived in France slightly ahead of schedule.

From Cannes he headed due north, taking the RN85 through the picturesque perfume town of Grasse and on towards Castellane where the turbulent Verdon river, tamed by the high dam a few miles upstream, flowed more obediently down from Savoy to join the Durance at Cadarache.

From here he pushed on to Barréme and the little spa town of Digne. The blazing heat of the Provençal plain had fallen away behind him, and the air of the hills was sweet and cool even in the heat. When he stopped he could feel the sun blazing down, but when motoring the wind was like a cooling shower and smelled of the pines and woodsmoke from the farms.

After Digne he crossed the Durance and ate lunch in a small but pretty hostelry looking down into the waters. In another hundred miles the Durance would become a grey and slimy snake hissing shallow amid the sun-bleached shingle of its bed at Cavaillon and Plan d’Orgon. But here in the hills it was still a river, the way a river should look, a cool and fishful river with shade along its banks and grass growing all the greener for its presence.

In the afternoon he followed the long northward curving run of the RN85 through Sisteron, still following the Durance upstream on its left bank until the road forked and the RN85 headed towards the north. As dusk was falling he entered the little town of Gap. He could have gone on towards Grenoble, but decided that as there was no hurry and more chance of finding rooms in August in a small town, he should look around for a country-style hotel. Just out of town he found the brightly gabled Hôtel du Cerf, formerly a hunting lodge of one of the Dukes of Savoy, and still retaining an air of rustic comfort and good food.

There were several rooms still vacant. He had a leisurely bath, a break with his usual habit of showering, and dressed in his dove-grey suit with a silk shirt and knitted tie, while the room-maid, after receiving several winning smiles, had blush-fully agreed to sponge and press the check suit he had worn all day so that he could have it back by morning.

The evening meal was taken in a panelled room overlooking a sweep of the wooded hillside, loud with the chatter of cicadas among the pinèdes. The air was warm and it was only halfway through the meal when one of the women diners, who wore a sleeveless dress and a decolleté, commented to the maître d’hôtel that a chill had entered the air that the windows were closed.

The Jackal turned round when he was asked if he objected to the window next to which he sat being closed, and glanced at the woman indicated by the maître as the person who had asked that they be shut. She was dining alone, a handsome woman in her late thirties with soft white arms and a deep bosom. The Jackal nodded to the maître to close the windows, and gave a slight inclination of the head to the woman behind him. She answered with a cool smile.

The meal was magnificent. He chose speckled river trout grilled on a wood fire, and tournedos broiled over charcoal with fennel and thyme. The wine was a local Côtes du Rhône, full, rich and in a bottle with no label. It had evidently come from the barrel in the cellar, the proprietor’s personal choice for his vin de la maison. Most of the diners were having it, and with reason.

As he finished his sorbet he heard the low and authoritative voice of the woman behind him telling the maître that she would take her coffee in the residents’ lounge, and the man bowed and addressed her as ‘Madame la Baronne’. A few minutes later the Jackal had also ordered his coffee in the lounge, and headed that way.

The call from Somerset House came for Superintendent Thomas at a quarter past ten. He was sitting by the open window of the office staring down into the now silent street where no restaurants beckoned late diners and drivers into the area. The offices between Millbank and Smith Square were silent hulks, lightless, blind, uncaring. Only in the anonymous block that housed the offices of the Special Branch did the lights burn late as always.

A mile away, in the bustling Strand, the lights were also burning late in the section of Somerset House that housed the death certificates of millions of Britain’s deceased citizens. Here Thomas’s team of six detective sergeants and two inspectors were hunched over their piles of paper work, rising every few minutes to accompany one of the staff clerks, kept back at work long after the others had gone home, down the rows of gleaming files to check on yet another name.

It was the senior inspector in charge of the team who rang. His voice was tired, but with a touch of optimism, a man hoping that what he had to say would get them all released from the grind of checking hundreds of death certificates that did not exist because the passport holders were not dead.

‘Alexander James Quentin Duggan,’ he announced briefly, after Thomas had answered.

‘What about him?’ said Thomas.

‘Born April 3rd, 1929, in Sambourne Fishley, in the parish of St Mark’s. Applied for a passport in the normal way on the normal form on July 14th this year. Passport issued the following day and mailed July 17th to the address on the application form. It will probably turn out to be an accommodation address.’

‘Why?’ asked Thomas. He disliked being kept waiting.

‘Because Alexander James Quentin Duggan was killed in a road accident in his home village at the age of two and a half, on November 8th, 1931.’

Thomas thought for a moment.

‘How many more of the passports issued in the last hundred days remain to be checked?’ he asked.

‘About three hundred to go,’ said the voice on the phone.

‘Leave the others to continue checking the remainder, just in case there is another phoney among the bunch,’ instructed Thomas. ‘Hand over the team leadership to the other fellow. I want you to check out that address to which the passport was sent. Report back to me by phone the moment you have found it. If it’s an occupied premises, interview the householder. Bring me back the full details on the phoney Duggan, and the file copy of the photograph he submitted with the application form. I want to have a look at this lad Calthrop in his new disguise.’

It was just before eleven that the senior inspector phoned back in. The address in question was a small tobacconist and newsagent shop in Paddington, the kind that had a window full of cards advertising the addresses of prostitutes. The owner, living above the shop, had been roused and had agreed he often took in mail for customers who had no fixed address. He made a charge for his services. He could not remember a regular customer named Duggan, but it could have been that Duggan only called twice, once to arrange for his mail to be received there, the second time to pick up the one envelope that he was waiting for. The inspector had showed the newsagent a photograph of Calthrop, but the man could not recognise him. He also showed him the photograph of Duggan on the application form, and the man said he thought he remembered the second man, but could not be sure. He felt the man might have worn dark glasses. Many of those who came into his shop to buy the erotic pin-up magazines displayed behind the counter wore dark glasses.

‘Bring him in,’ ordered Thomas, ‘and get back here yourself.’ Then he picked up the phone and asked for Paris.

A second time, the call came halfway through the evening conference. Commissaire Lebel had explained that beyond a doubt Calthrop was not inside France under his own name, unless he had smuggled himself into the country in a fishing boat or across one of the land borders at an isolated spot. He personally did not think a professional would do that, because at any subsequent spot check by the police he could be caught for not having his papers in order, that is, having no entry stamp on his passport.

Nor had any Charles Calthrop checked into any French hotel in his own name.

These facts were corroborated by the head of the Central Records office, the head of the DST and the Prefect of Police of Paris, so they were not disputed.

The two alternatives, argued Lebel, were that the man had not made any provision for obtaining a false passport, and had thought he was unsuspected. In that case, the police raid on his flat in London must have caught him short. He explained that he did not believe this, as Superintendent Thomas’s men had found gaps in the wardrobe and half-empty clothes drawers, and absence of washing accoutrements and shaving tackle, indicating that the man had left his London flat for a planned absence elsewhere. This was borne out by a neighbour, who reported Calthrop as having said he was going touring by car in Scotland. Neither the British nor the French police had any reason to believe this was true.

The second alternative was that Calthrop had acquired a false passport, and this was what the British police were presently searching for. In that event, he might either still not be in France, but at some other place completing his preparations, or he might already have entered France unsuspected.

It was at this point that several of the conference members exploded.

‘You mean he might be here, in France, even in the centre of Paris?’ expostulated Alexandre Sanguinetti.

‘The point is,’ explained Lebel, ‘that he has got his timetable, and only he knows it. We have been investigating for seventy-two hours. We have no way of knowing at which point in the man’s timetable we have intervened. The one thing we can be sure of is, that apart from knowing we are aware of the existence of a plot to assassinate the President, the killer cannot know what progress we have made. Therefore we stand a reasonable chance of apprehending an unsuspecting man, as soon as we have him identified under his new name, and located under that name.’

But the meeting refused to be mollified. The thought that the killer might even then be within a mile of them, and that in that man’s timetable the attempt on the life of the President might be for tomorrow, caused each of them acute anxiety.

‘It could be, of course,’ mused Colonel Rolland, ‘that having learned from Rodin, through the unknown agent Valmy, that the plan was exposed in principle, that Calthrop then left his flat to dispose of the evidence of his preparations. His gun and ammunition, for example, could even now be tipped into a lake in Scotland, so that he can present himself to his own police on his return as clean as a whistle. In that event it would be very difficult to bring charges.’

The meeting thought over Rolland’s suggestion, with increasing signs of agreement.

‘Then tell us, Colonel,’ said the Minister, ‘if you had been hired for this job, and had learned that the plot was exposed, even if your own identity were still a secret, is that what you would do?’

‘Certainly, Monsieur le Ministre,’ replied Rolland. ‘If I were an experienced assassin I would realise that I must be on some file somewhere, and with the plot exposed it could only be a matter of time before I received a visit from the police and a search of my premises. So I would want to get rid of the evidence, and what better place than an isolated Scottish lake.’

The round of smiles that greeted him from the table indicated how much those assembled approved of his speculation.

‘However, that does not mean that we should just let him go. I still think we should … take care of this Monsieur Calthrop.’

The smiles vanished. There was silence for several seconds.

‘I do not follow you, mon colonel,’ said General Guibaud.

‘Simply this,’ explained Rolland. ‘Our orders were to locate and destroy this man. He may have dismantled his plot for the moment. But he may not have destroyed his equipment, but merely hidden it, in order to pass the scrutiny of the British police. After that, he could simply take up again where he left off, but with a new set of preparations even more difficult to penetrate.’

‘But surely, when the British police locate him, if he is still in Britain, they will detain him?’ someone asked.

‘Not necessarily. Indeed I doubt it. They will probably have no proof, only suspicions. And our friends the English are notoriously sensitive about what they are pleased to call “civil liberties”. I suspect they may find him, interview him, and then let him go for lack of evidence.’

‘Of course the Colonel is right,’ interjected Saint-Clair. ‘The British police have stumbled on this man by a fluke. They are incredibly foolish about things like leaving a dangerous man at liberty. Colonel Rolland’s section should be authorised to render this man Calthrop harmless once and for all.’

The Minister noticed that Commissaire Lebel had remained silent and unsmiling throughout the interchange.

‘Well, Commissaire, and what do you think? Do you agree with Colonel Rolland that Calthrop is even now dismantling and hiding, or destroying, his preparations and equipment?’

Lebel glanced up at the two rows of expectant faces on each side of him.

‘I hope,’ he said quietly, ‘that the Colonel is right. But I fear he may not be.’

‘Why?’ The Minister’s question cut like a knife.

‘Because,’ explained Lebel mildly, ‘his theory, although logical if indeed Calthrop has decided to call off the operation, is based on the theory that he has indeed made that decision. Supposing he has not? Supposing he has either not received Rodin’s message or received it but decided to press ahead nevertheless?’

There was a buzz of deprecatory consternation. Only Rolland did not join in. He gazed contemplatively down the table at Lebel. What he was thinking was that Lebel had a far better brain than anyone present seemed prepared to give him credit for. Lebel’s ideas, he recognised, could well be as realistic as his own.

It was at this point that the call came through for Lebel. This time he was gone for over twenty minutes. When he came back he spoke to a completely silent assembly for a further ten minutes.

‘What do we do now?’ asked the Minister when he had finished. In his quiet way, without seeming to hurry, Lebel issued his orders like a general deploying his troops, and none of the men in the room, all senior to him in rank, disputed a word.

‘So there we are,’ he concluded, ‘we will all conduct a quiet and discreet nationwide search for Duggan in his new appearance, while the British police search the records of airline ticket offices, cross-Channel ferries, etc. If they locate him first, they pick him up if he is on British soil, or inform us if he has left it. If we locate him, inside France, we arrest him. If he is located in a third country, we can either wait for him to enter unsuspectingly and pick him up at the border, or … take another course of action. At that moment, however, I think my task of finding him will have been achieved. However, until that moment, gentlemen, I would be grateful if you would agree to do this my way.’

The effrontery was so bold, the assurance so complete, that nobody would say a thing. They just nodded. Even Saint-Clair de Villauban was silent.

It was not until he was at home shortly after midnight that he found an audience to listen to his torrent of outrage at the thought of this ridiculous little bourgeois policeman having been right, while the top experts of the land had been wrong.

His mistress listened to him with sympathy and understanding, massaging the back of his neck as he lay face down on their bed. It was not until just before dawn, when he was sound asleep, that she could slip away to the hall and make a brief phone call.

Superintendent Thomas looked down at the two separate application forms for passports, and two photographs, spread out on the blotter in the pool of light thrown by the reading lamp.

‘Let’s run through it again,’ he ordered the senior inspector seated beside him. ‘Ready?’

‘Sir.’

‘Calthrop: height, five feet eleven inches. Check?’

‘Sir.’

‘Duggan: height, six feet.’

‘Thickened heels, sir. You can raise your height up to two and a half inches with special shoes. A lot of short people in show business do it for vanity. Besides, at a passport counter no one looks at your feet.’

‘All right,’ agreed Thomas, ‘thick-heeled shoes. Calthrop: colour of hair, brown. That doesn’t mean much, it could vary from pale brown to chestnut brown. He looks to me here as if he had dark brown hair. Duggan also says, brown. But he looks like a pale blond.’

‘That’s true, sir. But hair habitually looks darker in photographs. It depends on the light, where it is placed and so forth. And then again, he could have tinted it paler to become Duggan.’

‘All right. I’ll wear that. Calthrop, colour of eyes, brown. Duggan, colour of eyes, grey.’

‘Contact lenses, sir, it’s a simple thing.’

‘OK. Calthrop’s age is thirty-seven, Duggan’s is thirty-four last April.’

‘He had to become thirty-four,’ explained the inspector, ‘because the real Duggan, the little boy who died at two and a half, was born in April 1929. That couldn’t be changed. But nobody would query a man who happened to be thirty-seven but whose passport said he was thirty-four. One would believe the passport.’

Thomas looked at the two photographs. Calthrop looked heftier, fuller in the face, a more sturdily built man. But to become Duggan he could have changed his appearance. Indeed, he had probably changed it even for his first meeting with the OAS chiefs, and remained with changed appearance ever since, including the period when he applied for the false passport. Men like this evidently had to be able to live in a second identity for months at a time if they were to escape identification. It was probably by being this shrewd and painstaking that Calthrop had managed to stay off every police file in the world. If it had not been for that bar rumour in the Caribbean they would never have got him at all.

But from now on he had become Duggan, dyed hair, tinted contact lenses, slimmed-down figure, raised heels. It was the description of Duggan, with passport number and photograph, that he sent down to the telex room to be transmitted to Paris. Lebel, he estimated, glancing at his watch, should have them all by two in the morning.

‘After that, it’s up to them,’ suggested the inspector.

‘Oh, no, boyo, after that there’s a lot more work to be done,’ said Thomas maliciously. ‘First thing in the morning we start checking the airline ticket offices, the cross-Channel ferries, the continental train ticket offices … the whole lot. We not only have to find out who he is now, but where he is now.’

At that moment a call came through from Somerset House. The last of the passport applications had been checked, and all were in order.

‘OK, thank the clerks and stand down. Eight-thirty sharp in my office, the lot of you,’ said Thomas.

A sergeant entered with a copy of the statement of the newsagent, who had been taken to his local police station and interviewed there. Thomas glanced at the sworn statement, which said little more than he had told the Special Branch inspector on his own doorstep.

‘There’s nothing we can hold him on,’ said Thomas. ‘Tell them at Paddington nick they can let him go back to his bed and his dirty photos, will you?’

The sergeant said ‘Sir,’ and left.

Thomas settled back in the armchair to try to get some sleep.

While he had been talking it had quietly become August 15th.

16

MADAME LA BARONNE DE LA CHALONNIÈRE PAUSED AT the door of her room and turned towards the young Englishman who had escorted her there. In the half-darkness of the corridor she could not make out the details of his face; it was just a blur in the gloom.

It had been a pleasant evening and she was still undecided whether she would or would not insist that it end at her doorway. The question had been at the back of her mind for the past hour.

On the one hand, although she had taken lovers before, she was a respectable married woman staying for a single night in a provincial hotel, and not in the habit of permitting herself to be seduced by total strangers. On the other hand she was at her most vulnerable, and was candid enough to admit it to herself.

She had spent the day at the military cadet academy at Barcelonette, high in the Alps, attending the passing-out parade of her son as a newly breveted second lieutenant in the Chasseurs Alpins, his father’s old regiment. Although she had undoubtedly been the most attractive mother at the parade, the sight of her son receiving his officer’s bars and commissioned into the French Army had brought home to her with something of a shock the full realisation that she was a few months short of forty, and the mother of a grown son.

Although she could pass for five years younger, and sometimes felt ten years less than her age, the knowledge that her son was twenty and probably screwing his own women by now, no more to come home for the school holidays and go shooting in the forests around the family château, had caused her to wonder what she was going to do now.

She had accepted the laborious gallantry of the creaking old colonel who was the academy commandant, and the admiring glances of the pink-cheeked class-mates of her own boy, and had felt suddenly very lonely. Her marriage, she had known for years, was finished in all but name, for the Baron was too busy chasing the teenage dollies of Paris between the Bilboquet and Castel’s to come down to the château for the summer, or even to turn up at his son’s commissioning.

It had occurred to her as she drove the family saloon back from the high Alps to stay overnight at a country hotel outside Gap that she was handsome, virile and alone. Nothing now seemed to lie in prospect but the attentions of elderly gallants like the colonel at the academy, or frivolous and unsatisfying flirtations with boys, and she was damned if she was going to devote herself to charitable works. Not yet, at any rate.

But Paris was an embarrassment and a humiliation, with Alfred constantly chasing his teenagers and half society laughing at him and the other half laughing at her.

She had been wondering about the future over coffee in the lounge, and feeling an urge to be told she was a woman and a beautiful one, and not simply Madame la Baronne, when the Englishman had walked across and asked if, as they were alone in the residents’ salon, he might take his coffee with her. She had been caught unawares, and too surprised to say no.

She could have kicked herself a few seconds later, but after ten minutes she did not regret accepting his offer. He was, after all, between thirty-three and thirty-five, or so she estimated, and that was the best age for a man. Although he was English, he spoke fluent and rapid French; he was reasonably good-looking, and could be amusing. She had enjoyed the deft compliments, and had even encouraged him to pay them, so that it was close to midnight when she rose, explaining that she had to make an early start the following morning.

He had escorted her up the stairs and at the landing window had pointed outside at the wooded hill slopes bathed in bright moonlight. They had stayed for a few moments looking at the sleeping countryside, until she had glanced at him and seen that his eyes were not on the view beyond the window but on the deep divide between her breasts where the moonlight turned the skin to alabaster white.

He had smiled when detected, and leaned to her ear and murmured, ‘Moonlight turns even the most civilised man into a primitive.’ She had turned and walked on up the stairs, feigning annoyance, but inside her the unabashed admiration of the stranger caused a flutter of pleasure.

‘It has been a most pleasant evening, monsieur.’

She had her hand on the handle of the door, and wondered vaguely whether the man would try to kiss her. In a way she hoped he would. Despite the triteness of the words she could feel the hunger beginning in her belly. Perhaps it was just the wine, or the fiery Calvados he had ordered with the coffee, or the scene in the moonlight, but she was aware that this was not how she had foreseen the evening ending.

She felt the stranger’s arms slip round her back, without a word of warning, and his lips came down on to hers. They were warm and firm. ‘This must stop,’ said a voice inside her. A second later she had responded to the kiss, mouth closed. The wine made her head swim, it must have been the effect of the wine. She felt the arms round her tighten perceptibly and they were hard and strong.

Her thigh was pressed against him below the belly and through the satin of her dress she felt the rigid arrogance of his prick. For a second she withdrew her leg, then pushed it back again. There was no conscious moment of decision-taking; the realisation came without effort that she wanted him badly, between her thighs, inside her belly, all night.

She felt the door behind her open inwards, broke the embrace and stepped backwards into her room.

‘Viens, primitif.’

He stepped into the room and closed the door.

Throughout the night every archive in the Pantheon was checked again, this time for the name of Duggan, and with more success. A card was unearthed showing that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22nd. An hour later another report from the same frontier post, the Customs unit that regularly travels on the express trains from Brussels to Paris and back, doing its task while the train is in motion, was found with Duggan’s name among those passengers on the Etoile du Nord Express from Paris to Brussels on July 31st.

From the Prefecture of Police came a hotel card filled out in the name of Duggan, and quoting a passport number that matched the one Duggan was carrying, as contained in the information from London, showing that he had stayed in a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine between July 22nd and 30th inclusive.

Inspector Caron was all for raiding the hotel, but Lebel preferred to pay a quiet visit in the small hours of the morning and had a chat with the proprietor. He was satisfied the man he sought was not at the hotel by August 15th, and the proprietor was grateful for the Commissaire’s discretion in not waking all his guests.

Lebel ordered a plain-clothes detective to check into the hotel as a guest until further notice, and to stay there without moving outside, in case Duggan turned up again. The proprietor was happy to co-operate.

‘This July visit,’ Lebel told Caron when he was back in his office at 4.30, ‘was a reconnaissance trip. Whatever he has got planned, it’s all laid on.’

Then he lay back in his chair, gazed at the ceiling, and thought. Why did he stay in a hotel? Why not in the house of one of the OAS sympathisers, like all the other OAS agents on the run? Because he does not trust the OAS sympathisers to keep their mouths shut. He’s quite right. So he works alone, trusting nobody, plotting and planning his own operation in his own way, using a false passport, probably behaving normally, politely, raising no suspicion. The proprietor of the hotel whom he had just interviewed confirmed this, ‘A real gentleman,’ he had said. A real gentleman, thought Lebel, and dangerous as a snake. They are always the worst kind, for a policeman, the real gentlemen. Nobody ever suspected them.

He glanced at the two photographs that had come in from London, of Calthrop and Duggan. Calthrop become Duggan, with a change of height, hair and eyes, age and, probably, manner. He tried to build up a mental image of the man. What would he be like to meet? Confident, arrogant, assured of his immunity. Dangerous, devious, meticulous, leaving nothing to chance. Armed of course, but with what? An automatic under the left armpit? A throwing knife lashed against the ribs? A rifle? But where would he put it when he went through Customs? How would he get near to General de Gaulle carrying such a thing, when even women’s handbags were suspect within twenty yards of the President, and men with long packages were hustled away without ceremony from anywhere near a public appearance by the President?

Mon Dieu, and that colonel from the Elysée thinks he’s just another thug! Lebel was aware he had one advantage: he knew the killer’s new name, and the killer did not know that he knew. That was his only ace; apart from that it all lay with the Jackal, and nobody at the evening conference could or would realise it.

If he ever gets wind of what you know before you catch him, and changes his identity again, Claude my boy, he thought, you are going to be up against it in a big way.

Aloud, he said ‘Really up against it.’

Caron looked up.

‘You’re right, chief. He hasn’t a chance.’

Lebel was short-tempered with him, which was unusual. The lack of sleep must be beginning to tell.

The finger of light from the waning moon beyond the window panes withdrew slowly across the rumpled coverlet and back towards the casement. It picked out the rumpled satin dress between the door and the foot of the bed, the discarded brassiere and limp nylons scattered on the carpet. The two figures on the bed were muffled in shadow.

Colette lay on her back and gazed up at the ceiling, the fingers of one hand running idly through the blond hair of the head pillowed on her belly. Her lips parted in a half-smile as she thought back over the night.

He had been good, this English primitive, hard but skilled, knowing how to use fingers and tongue and prick to bring her on five times and himself three. She could still feel the blazing heat going into her when he came, and she knew how badly she had needed a night like this for so long when she responded as she had not for years.

She glanced at the small travelling clock beside the bed. It said a quarter past five. She tightened her grip in the blond hair and pulled.

‘Hey.’

The Englishman muttered, half asleep. They were both lying naked among the disordered sheets, but the central heating kept the room comfortably warm. The blond head disengaged itself from her hand and slid between her thighs. She could feel the tickle of the hot breath and the tongue flickering in search again.

‘No, no more.’

She closed her thighs quickly, sat up and grabbed the hair, raising his face until she could look at him. He eased himself up the bed, plunged his face on to one of her full heavy breasts and started to kiss.

‘I said no.’

He looked up at her.

‘That’s enough, lover. I have to get up in two hours, and you have to go back to your room. Now, my little English, now.’

He got the message and nodded, swinging off the bed to stand on the floor, looking round for his clothes. She slid under the bedclothes, sorted them out from the mess around her knees and pulled them up to the chin. When he was dressed, with jacket and tie slung over one arm, he looked down at her in the half-darkness and she saw the gleam of teeth as he grinned. He sat on the edge of the bed and ran his right hand round to the back of her neck. His face was a few inches from hers.

‘It was good?’

‘Mmmmmm. It was very good. And you?’

He grinned again. ‘What do you think?’

She laughed. ‘What is your name?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Alex,’ he lied.

‘Well, Alex it was very good. But it is also time you went back to your own room.’

He bent down and gave her a kiss on the lips.

‘In that case, good night, Colette.’

A second later he was gone, and the door closed behind him.

At seven in the morning, as the sun was rising, a local gendarme cycled up to the Hotel du Cerf, dismounted and entered the lobby. The proprietor who was already up and busy behind the reception desk organising the morning calls and café complet for the guests in their rooms, greeted him.

‘Alors, bright and early?’

‘As usual,’ said the gendarme. ‘It’s a long ride out here on a bicycle, and I always leave you till the last.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ grinned the proprietor, ‘we do the best breakfast coffee in the neighbourhood. Marie-Louise, bring Monsieur a cup of coffee, and no doubt he’ll take it laced with a little Trou Normand.’

The country constable grinned with pleasure.

‘Here are the cards,’ said the proprietor, handing over the little white cards filled in the previous evening by the newly arrived guests. ‘There were only three new ones last night.’

The constable took the cards and put them in the leather pouch on his belt.

‘Hardly worth turning up for,’ he grinned, but sat on the foyer bench and waited for his coffee and calvados, exchanging a few words of lustful banter with Marie-Louise when she brought it.

It was not until eight that he got back to the gendarmerie and commissariat of Gap with his pouchful of hotel registration cards. These were then taken by the station inspector who flicked through them idly and put them in the rack, to be taken later in the day to the regional headquarters at Lyons, and later to the archives of Central Records in Paris. Not that he could see the point of it all.

As the inspector was dropping the cards into the rack in the commissariat, Madame Colette de la Chalonnière settled her bill, climbed behind the wheel of her car and drove off towards the west. One floor above, the Jackal slept on until nine o’clock.

Superintendent Thomas had dozed off when the phone beside him gave a shrill buzz. It was the intercom phone linking his office with the room down the corridor where the six sergeants and two inspectors had been working on a battery of telephones since his briefing had ended.

He glanced at his watch. Ten o’clock. Damn, not like me to drop off. Then he remembered how many hours’ sleep he had had, or rather had not had, since Dixon had summoned him on Monday afternoon. And now it was Thursday morning. The phone buzzed again.

‘Hallo.’

The voice of the senior detective inspector answered.

‘Friend Duggan,’ he began without preliminary. ‘He left London on a scheduled BEA flight on Monday morning. The booking was taken on Saturday. No doubt about the name. Alexander Duggan. Paid cash at the airport for the ticket.’

‘Where to? Paris?’

‘No, Super. Brussels.’

Thomas’s head cleared quickly.

‘All right, listen. He may have gone but come back. Keep checking airline bookings to see if there have been any other bookings in his name. Particularly if there is a booking for a flight that has not yet left London. Check with advance bookings. If he came back from Brussels, I want to know. But I doubt it. I think we’ve lost him, although of course he left London several hours before investigations were started, so it’s not our fault. OK?’

‘Right. What about the search in the UK for the real Calthrop? It’s tying up a lot of the provincial police, and the Yard’s just been on to say that they’re complaining.’

Thomas thought for a moment.

‘Call it off,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty certain he’s gone.’

He picked up the outside phone and asked for the office of Commissaire Lebel at the Police Judiciaire.

Inspector Caron thought he was going to end up in a lunatic asylum before Thursday morning was out. First the British were on the phone at five past ten. He took the call himself, but when Superintendent Thomas insisted on speaking to Lebel he went over to the corner to rouse the sleeping form on the camp-bed. Lebel looked as if he had died a week before. But he took the call. As soon as he had identified himself to Thomas, Caron had to take the receiver back because of the language barrier. He translated what Thomas had to say, and Lebel’s replies.

‘Tell him,’ said Lebel when he had digested the information, ‘that we will handle the Belgians from here. Say that he has my very sincere thanks for his help, and that if the killer can be traced to a location on the Continent rather than in Britain, I will inform him immediately so that he can stand his men down.’

When the receiver was down both men settled back at their desks. ‘Get me the Sûreté in Brussels,’ said Lebel.

The Jackal rose when the sun was already high over the hills and gave promise of another beautiful summer day. He showered and dressed, taking his check suit, well pressed, from the hands of the maid, Marie-Louise, who blushed again when he thanked her.

Shortly after ten-thirty he drove the Alfa into town and went to the post office to use the long-distance telephone to Paris. When he emerged twenty minutes later he was tight-lipped and in a hurry. At a hardware store nearby he bought a quart of high-gloss lacquer in midnight blue, a half-pint tin in white, and two brushes, one a fine-tipped camel-hair for lettering, the other a two-inch soft bristle. He also bought a screwdriver. With these in the glove compartment of the car he drove back to the Hôtel du Cerf and asked for his bill.

While it was being prepared he went upstairs to pack, and carried the suitcases down to the car himself. When the three cases were in the boot and the hand-grip on the passenger seat, he re-entered the foyer and settled the bill. The day clerk who had taken over the reception desk would say later that he seemed hurried and nervous, and paid the bill with a new hundred-franc note.

What he did not say, because he had not seen it, was that while he was in the back room getting change for the note the blond Englishman turned over the pages of the hotel registry that the clerk had been making up for that day’s list of coming clients. Flicking back one page, the Englishman had seen yesterday’s inscriptions including one in the name of Mme La Baronne de la Chalonnière, Haute Chalonnière, Corrèze.

A few moments after settling the bill the roar of the Alfa was heard in the driveway, and the Englishman was gone.

Just before midday more messages came into the office of Claude Lebel. The Sûreté of Brussels rang to say Duggan had only spent five hours in the city on Monday. He had arrived by BEA from London, but had left on the afternoon Alitalia flight to Milan. He had paid cash at the desk for his ticket, although it had been booked on the previous Saturday by phone from London.

Lebel at once placed another call with the Milanese police.

As he put the phone down it rang again. This time it was the DST, to say that a report had been received as normal routine that the previous morning among those entering France from Italy over the Ventimiglia crossing point, and filling in cards as they did so, had been Alexander James Quentin Duggan.

Lebel had exploded.

‘Nearly thirty hours,’ he yelled. ‘Over a day …’ He slammed down the receiver. Caron raised an eyebrow.

‘The card,’ explained Lebel wearily, ‘has been in transit between Ventimiglia and Paris. They are now sorting out yesterday morning’s entry cards from all over France. They say there are over twenty-five thousand of them. For one day, mark you. I suppose I shouldn’t have yelled. At least we know one thing—he’s here. Definitely. Inside France. If I don’t have something for the meeting tonight they’ll skin me. Oh, by the way, ring up Superintendent Thomas and thank him again. Tell him the Jackal is inside France, and we shall handle it from here.’

As Caron replaced the receiver after the London call, the Service Regional headquarters of the PJ at Lyons came on the phone. Lebel listened, then glanced up at Caron triumphantly. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

‘We’ve got him. He’s registered for two days at the Hôtel du Cerf in Gap, starting last night.’ He uncovered the mouthpiece and spoke down it.

‘Now listen, Commissaire, I am not in a position to explain to you why we want this man Duggan. Just take it from me it is important. This is what I want you to do …’

He spoke for ten minutes, and as he finished, the phone on Caron’s desk rang. It was the DST again to say Duggan had entered France in a hired white Alfa Romeo sports two-seater, registration MI-61741.

‘Shall I put out an all-stations alert for it?’ asked Caron.

Lebel thought for a moment.

‘No, not yet. If he’s out motoring in the countryside somewhere he’ll probably be picked up by a country cop who thinks he’s just looking for a stolen sports car. He’ll kill anybody who tries to intercept him. The gun must be in the car somewhere. The important thing is that he’s booked into the hotel for two nights. I want an army round that hotel when he gets back. Nobody must get hurt if it can be avoided. Come on, if we want to get that helicopter, let’s go.’

While he was speaking the entire police force at Gap was moving steel road blocks into position on all the exits from the town and the area of the hotel and posting men in the undergrowth round the barriers. Their orders came from Lyons. At Grenoble and Lyons men armed with submachine guns and rifles were clambering into two fleets of Black Marias. At Satory Camp outside Paris a helicopter was being made ready for Commissaire Lebel’s flight to Gap.

Even in the shade of the trees the heat of early afternoon was sweltering. Stripped to the waist to avoid staining more of his clothes than was necessary, the Jackal worked on the car for two hours.

After leaving Gap he had headed due west through Veyne and Aspres-sur-Buëch. It was downhill most of the way, the road winding between the mountains like a carelessly discarded ribbon. He had pushed the car to the limit, hurling it into the tight bends on squealing tyres, twice nearly sending another driver coming the other way over the edge into one of the chasms below. After Aspres he picked up the RN93 which followed the course of the Drôme river eastwards to join the Rhône.

For another eighteen miles the road had hunted back and forth across the river. Shortly after Luc-en-Diois he had thought it time to get the Alfa off the road. There were plenty of side roads leading away into the hills and the upland villages. He had taken one at random and after a mile and a half chosen a path to the right leading into the woods.

In the middle of the afternoon he had finished painting and stood back. The car was a deep gleaming blue, most of the paint already dry. Although by no means a professional painting job, it would pass muster except if given a close inspection, and particularly in the dusk. The two number plates had been unscrewed and lay face down on the grass. On the back of each had been painted in white an imaginary French number of which the last two letters were 75, the registration code for Paris. The Jackal knew this was the commonest type of car number on the roads of France.

The car’s hiring and insurance papers evidently did not match the blue French Alfa as they had the white Italian one, and if he were stopped for a road check, without papers, he was done for. The only question in his mind as he dipped a rag in the petrol tank and wiped the paint stains off his hands was whether to start motoring now and risk the bright sunlight showing up the amateurishness of the paintwork on the car, or whether to wait until dusk.

He estimated that with his false name once discovered, his point of entry into France would follow not long behind, and with it a search for the car. He was days too early for the assassination, and he needed to find a place to lie low until he was ready. That meant getting to the department of Corrèze two hundred and fifty miles across country, and the quickest way was by using the car. It was a risk, but he decided it had to be taken. Very well, then, the sooner the better, before every speed cop in the country was looking for an Alfa Romeo with a blond Englishman at the wheel.

He screwed the new number plates on, threw away what remained of the paint and the two brushes, pulled back on his polo-necked silk sweater and jacket, and gunned the engine into life. As he swept back on to the RN93 he checked his watch. It was 3.41 in the afternoon.

High overhead he watched a helicopter clattering on its way towards the east. It was seven miles further to the village of Die. He knew well enough not to pronounce it in the English way, but the coincidence of the name occurred to him. He was not superstitious, but his eyes narrowed as he drove into the centre of the town. At the main square near the war memorial a huge black-leather-coated motor-cycle policeman was standing in the middle of the road waving him to stop and pull in to the extreme right-hand side of the road. His gun, he knew, was still in its tubes wired to the chassis of the car. He carried no automatic or knife. For a second he hesitated, unsure whether to hit the policeman a glancing blow with the wing of the car and keep driving, later to abandon the car a dozen miles further on and try without a mirror or a washbasin to transform himself into Pastor Jensen, with four pieces of luggage to cope with, or whether to stop.

It was the policeman who made the decision for him. Ignoring him completely as the Alfa began to slow down, the policeman turned round and scanned the road in the other direction. The Jackal slid the car into the side of the road, watched and waited.

From the far side of the village he heard the wailing of sirens. Whatever happened, it was too late to get out now. Into the village came a convoy of four Citroën police cars and six Black Marias. As the traffic cop jumped to one side and swept his arm up in salute, the convoy raced past the parked Alfa and headed down the road from which he had come. Through the wired windows of the vans, which give them the French nickname of salad-baskets, he could see the rows of helmeted police, submachine guns across their knees.

Almost as soon as it had come, the convoy was gone. The speed cop brought his arm down from the salute, gave the Jackal an indolent gesture that he could now proceed, and stalked off to his motor-cycle parked against the war memorial. He was still kicking the starter when the blue Alfa disappeared round the corner heading west.

It was 4.50 pm when they hit the Hôtel du Cerf. Claude Lebel, who had landed a mile on the other side of the township and been driven to the driveway of the hotel in a police car, walked up to the front door accompanied by Caron who carried a loaded and cocked MAT 49 submachine carbine under the mackintosh slung over his right arm. The forefinger was on the trigger. Everyone in the town knew there was something afoot by this time, except the proprietor of the hotel. It had been isolated for five hours, and the only odd thing had been the non-arrival of the trout-seller with his day’s catch of fresh fish.

Summoned by the desk clerk, the proprietor appeared from his labours over the accounts in the office. Lebel listened to him answer Caron’s questions, glancing nervously at the odd-shaped bundle under Caron’s arm, and his shoulders sagged.

Five minutes later the hotel was deluged with uniformed police. They interviewed the staff, examined the bedroom, chased through the grounds. Lebel walked alone out into the drive and stared up at the surrounding hills. Caron joined him.

‘You think he’s really gone, chief?’ Lebel nodded.

‘He’s gone all right.’

‘But he was booked in for two days. Do you think the proprietor’s in this with him?’

‘No. He and the staff aren’t lying. He changed his mind some time this morning. And he left. The question now is where the hell has he gone, and does he suspect yet that we know who he is?’

‘But how could he? He couldn’t know that. It must be coincidence. It must be.’

‘My dear Lucien, let us hope so.’

‘All we’ve got to go on now, then, is the car number.’

‘Yes. That was my mistake. We should have put the alert out for the car. Get on to the police R/T to Lyons from one of the squad cars and make it an all-stations alert. Top priority. White Alfa Romeo, Italian, Number MI-61741. Approach with caution, occupant believed armed and dangerous. You know the drill. But one more thing, nobody is to mention it to the Press. Include in the message the instruction that the suspected man probably does not know he’s suspected, and I’ll skin anybody who lets him hear it on the radio or read it in the Press. I’m going to tell Commissaire Gaillard of Lyons to take over here. Then let’s get back to Paris.’

It was nearly six o’clock when the blue Alfa coasted into the town of Valence where the steel torrent of the Route Nationale Seven, the main road from Lyons to Marseilles and the highway carrying most of the traffic from Paris to the Côte d’Azur, thunders along the banks of the Rhône. The Alfa crossed the great road running south and took the bridge over the river towards the RN533 to St Péray on the western bank. Below the bridge the mighty river smouldered in the afternoon sunlight, ignored the puny steel insects scurrying southwards and rolled at its own leisurely but certain pace towards the waiting Mediterranean.

After St Péray, as dusk settled on the valley behind him, the Jackal gunned the little sports car higher and higher into the mountains of the Massif Central and the province of Auvergne. After Le Puy the going got steeper, the mountains higher and every town seemed to be a watering spa where the life-giving streams flowing out from the rocks of the massif had attracted those with aches and eczemas developed in the cities and made fortunes for the cunning Auvergnat peasants who had gone into the spa business with a will.

After Brioude the valley of the Allier river dropped behind, and the smell in the night air was of heather and drying hay in the upland pastures. He stopped to fill the tank at Issoire, then sped on through the casino town of Mont Doré and the spa of La Bourdoule. It was nearly midnight when he rounded the headwaters of the Dordogne, where it rises among the Auvergne rocks to flow south and west through half a dozen dams and spend itself into the Atlantic at Bordeaux.

From La Bourdoule he took the RN89 towards Ussel, the county town of Corrèze.

‘You are a fool, Monsieur le Commissaire, a fool. You had him within your grasp, and you let him slip.’ Saint-Clair had half-risen to his feet to make his point, and glared down the polished mahogany table at the top of Lebel’s head. The detective was studying the papers of his dossier, for all the world as if Saint-Clair did not exist.

He had decided that was the only way to treat the arrogant colonel from the Palace, and Saint-Clair for his part was not quite sure whether the bent head indicated an appropriate sense of shame or an insolent indifference. He preferred to believe it was the former. When he had finished and sank back into his seat, Claude Lebel looked up.

‘If you will look at the mimeographed report in front of you, my dear Colonel, you will observe that we did not have him in our hands,’ he observed mildly. ‘The report from Lyons that a man in the name of Duggan had registered the previous evening at a hotel in Gap did not reach the PJ until 12.15 today. We now know that the Jackal left the hotel abruptly at 11.05. Whatever measures had been taken, he still had an hour’s start.

‘Moreover, I cannot accept your strictures on the efficiency of the police forces of this country in general. I would remind you that the orders of the President are that this affair will be managed in secret. It was therefore not possible to put out an alert to every rural gendarmerie for a man named Duggan for it would have started a hullabaloo in the Press. The card registering Duggan at the Hôtel du Cerf was collected in the normal way at the normal time, and sent with due dispatch to Regional Headquarters at Lyons. Only there was it realised that Duggan was a wanted man. This delay was unavoidable, unless we wish to launch a nationwide hue-and-cry for the man, and that is outside my brief.

‘And, lastly, Duggan was registered at the hotel for two days. We do not know what made him change his mind at 11 am today and decide to move elsewhere.’

‘Probably your police gallivanting about the place,’ snapped Saint-Clair.

‘I have already made it plain, there was no gallivanting before 12.15 and the man was already seventy minutes gone,’ said Lebel.

‘All right, we have been unlucky, very unlucky,’ cut in the Minister. ‘However there is still the question of why no immediate search for the car was instituted. Commissaire?’

‘I agree it was a mistake, Minister, in the light of events. I had reason to believe the man was at the hotel and intended to spend the night there. If he had been motoring in the vicinity, and had been intercepted by a motor-patrol man for driving a wanted car, he would almost certainly have shot the unsuspecting policeman, and thus forewarned made his escape …’

‘Which is precisely what he has done,’ said Saint-Clair.

‘True, but we have no evidence to suggest that he has been forewarned, as he would have been if his car had been stopped by a single patrolman. It may well be he just decided to move on somewhere else. If so, and if he checks into another hotel tonight, he will be reported. Alternately, if his car is seen he will be reported.’

‘When did the alert for the white Alfa go out?’ asked the director of the PJ, Max Fernet.

‘I issued the instructions at 5.15 pm from the courtyard of the hotel,’ replied Lebel. ‘It should have reached all major road-patrol units by seven, and the police on duty in the main towns should be informed throughout the night as they check in for night duty. In view of the danger of this man, I have listed the car as stolen, with instructions that its presence be reported immediately to the Regional HQ, but that no approach should be made to the occupant by a lone policeman. If this meeting decides to change these orders, then I must ask that the responsibility for what may ensue be taken by this meeting.’

There was a long silence.

‘Regrettably, the life of a police officer cannot be allowed to stand in the way of protecting the President of France,’ murmured Colonel Rolland. There were signs of assent from round the table.

‘Perfectly true,’ assented Lebel. ‘Providing a single police officer can stop this man. But most town and country policemen, the ordinary men on the beat and the motor patrolmen, are not professional gunfighters. This Jackal is. If he is intercepted, shoots down one or two policemen, makes another getaway and disappears, we shall have two things to cope with: one will be a killer fully forewarned and perhaps able to adopt yet a new identity about which we know nothing, the other will be a nationwide headline story in every newspaper which we will not be able to play down. If the Jackal’s real reason for being in France remains a secret for forty-eight hours after the killing story breaks, I will be most surprised. The Press will know within days that he is after the President. If anyone here would like to explain that to the General, I will willingly retire from this investigation and hand it over.’

No one volunteered. The meeting broke up as usual around midnight. Within thirty minutes it had become Friday, August 16th.

17

THE BLUE ALFA ROMEO cruised into the Place de la Gare at Ussel just before one in the morning. There was one café remaining open across the square from the station entrance, and a few late-night travellers waiting for a train were sipping coffee. The Jackal dragged a comb through his hair and walked past the stacked-up chairs and tables on the terrace and up to the bar counter. He was cold, for the mountain air was chill when driving at over sixty miles an hour; and stiff, with aching thighs and arms from hauling the Alfa through innumerable mountain curves; and hungry, for he had not eaten since dinner twenty-eight hours previously, apart from a buttered roll for breakfast.

He ordered two large buttered slices of a long thin loaf, sliced down the middle and known as a tartine beurrée, and four hard-boiled eggs from the stand on the counter. Also a large white coffee.

While the buttered bread was being prepared and the coffee was percolating through the filter, he glanced round for the telephone booth. There was none, but a telephone stood at the end of the counter.

‘Have you got the local telephone directory?’ he asked the barman. Without a word, still busy, the barman gestured to a pile of directories on a rack behind the counter.

‘Help yourself,’ he said.

The Baron’s name was listed under the words ‘Chalonnière, M. le Baron de la …’ and the address was the château at La Haute Chalonnière. The Jackal knew this, but the village was not listed on his road map. However, the telephone number was given as Egletons, and he found this easily enough. It was another thirty kilometres beyond Ussel on the RN89. He settled down to eat his eggs and sandwiches.

It was just before two in the morning that he passed a stone by the roadside saying ‘Egletons, 6 km’ and decided to abandon the car in one of the forests that bordered the road. They were dense woods, probably the estate of some local noble, where once boars had been hunted with horse and hound. Perhaps they still were, for parts of Corrèze seem to have stepped straight from the days of Louis the Sun King.

Within a few hundred metres he had found a drive leading into the forest, separated from the road by a wooden pole slung across the entrance, adorned by a placard saying ‘Chasse Privée’. He removed the pole, drove the car into the wood and replaced the pole.

From there he drove half a mile into the forest, the headlamps lighting the gnarled shapes of the trees like ghosts reaching down with angry branches at the trespasser. Finally he stopped the car, switched off the headlights, and took the wire-cutters and torch from the glove compartment.

He spent an hour underneath the vehicle, his back getting damp from the dew on the forest floor. At last the steel tubes containing the sniper’s rifle were free from their hiding place of the previous sixty hours, and he re-packed them in the suitcase with the old clothes and the army greatcoat. He had a last look round the car to make sure there was nothing left in it that could give anyone who found it a hint of who its driver had been, and drove it hard into the centre of a nearby clump of wild rhododendron.

Using the metal shears, he spent the next hour cutting rhododendron branches from nearby bushes and jabbing them into the ground in front of the hole in the shrubbery made by the Alfa, until it was completely hidden from view.

He knotted his tie with one end round the handle of one of the suitcases, the other end round the handle of the second case. Using the tie like a railway porter’s strap, his shoulder under the loop so that one case hung down his chest and the other down his back, he was able to grab the remaining two pieces of baggage in his two free hands and start the march back to the road.

It was slow going. Every hundred yards he stopped, put the cases down and went back over his tracks with a branch from a tree, sweeping away the light impressions made in the moss and twigs by the passage of the Alfa. It took another hour to reach the road, duck under the pole, and put half a mile between himself and the entrance to the forest.

His check suit was soiled and grimy, the polo sweater stuck to his back with greasy obstinacy, and he thought his muscles would never stop aching again. Lining the suitcases up in a row, he sat down to wait as the eastern sky grew a fraction paler than the surrounding night. Country buses, he reminded himself, tend to start early.

In fact he was lucky. A farm lorry towing a trailer of hay came by at 5.50 heading towards the market town.

‘Car broken down?’ bawled the driver as he slowed up.

‘No. I’ve got a weekend pass from camp, so I’m hitch-hiking home. Got as far as Ussel last night and decided to push on to Tulle. I’ve got an uncle there who can fix me a lorry to Bordeaux. This was as far as I got.’ He grinned at the driver, who laughed and shrugged.

‘Crazy, walking through the night up here. No one comes this way after dark. Jump on the trailer, I’ll take you in to Egletons, you can try from there.’

They rolled into the little town at quarter to seven. The Jackal thanked the farmer, gave him the slip round the back of the station and headed for a café.

‘Is there a taxi in town?’ he asked the barman over coffee.

The barman gave him the number and he rang to call up the taxi company. There was one car that would be available in half an hour, he was told. While he waited he used the fundamental conveniences of the cold-water tap offered by the café’s lavatory to wash his face and hands, change into a fresh suit and brush his teeth which felt furry from cigarettes and coffee.

The taxi arrived at 7.30, an old rattletrap Renault.

‘Do you know the village of Haute Chalonnière?’ he asked the driver.

‘ ’Course.’

‘How far?’

‘Eighteen kilometres.’ The man jerked his thumb up towards the mountains. ‘In the hills.’

‘Take me there,’ said the Jackal, and hefted his luggage on to the roof rack, except for one case that went inside with him.

He insisted on being dropped in front of the Café de la Poste in the village square. There was no need for the taxi-driver from the nearby town to know he was going to the château. When the taxi had driven away he brought his luggage into the café. Already the square was blazing hot, and two oxen yoked to a hay-cart ruminated their cud reflectively outside while fat black flies promenaded round their gentle patient eyes.

Inside the café it was dark and cool. He heard rather than saw the customers shift at their tables to examine the newcomer, and there was a clacking of clogs on tiles as an old peasant woman in a black dress left one group of farm workers and went behind the bar.

‘Monsieur?’ she croaked.

He put down the luggage and leaned on the bar. The locals, he noticed, were drinking red wine.

‘Un gros rouge, s’il vous plaît, madame.’

‘How far is the château, madame,’ he asked when the wine was poured. She eyed him keenly from wily black marbles.

‘Two kilometres, monsieur.’

He sighed wearily. ‘That fool of a driver tried to tell me there was no château here. So he dropped me in the square.’

‘He was from Egletons?’ she asked. The Jackal nodded.

‘They are fools at Egletons,’ she said.

‘I have to get to the château,’ he said.

The ring of peasants watching from their tables made no move. No one suggested how he might get there. He pulled out a new hundred-franc note.

‘How much is the wine, madame?’

She eyed the note sharply. There was a shifting among the blue cotton blouses and trousers behind him.

‘I haven’t got change for that,’ said the old woman.

He sighed.

‘If only there were someone with a van, he might have change,’ he said.

Someone got up and approached from behind.

‘There is a van in the village, monsieur,’ growled a voice.

The Jackal turned with mock surprise.

‘It belongs to you, mon ami?’

‘No, monsieur, but I know the man who owns it. He might run you up there.’

The Jackal nodded as if considering the merits of the idea.

‘In the meantime, what will you take?’

The peasant nodded at the crone, who poured another large glass of rough red wine.

‘And your friends? It’s a hot day. A thirsty day.’

The stubbled face split into a smile. The peasant nodded again to the woman who took two full bottles over to the group round the big table. ‘Benoit, go and get the van,’ ordered the peasant, and one of the men, gulping down his wine in one swallow, went outside.

The advantage of the peasantry of the Auvergne, it would seem, mused the Jackal, as he rattled and bumped the last two kilometres up to the château, is that they are so surly they keep their damn mouths shut—at least to outsiders.

Colette de la Chalonnière sat up in bed, sipped her coffee and read the letter again. The anger that had possessed her on the first reading had dissipated, to be replaced by a kind of weary disgust.

She wondered what on earth she could do with the rest of her life. She had been welcomed home the previous afternoon after a leisurely drive from Gap by old Ernestine, the maid who had been in service at the château since Alfred’s father’s day, and the gardener, Louison, a former peasant boy who had married Ernestine when she was still an under housemaid.

The pair were now virtually the curators of the château of which two-thirds of the rooms were shut off and blanketed in dust covers.

She was, she realised, the mistress of an empty castle where there were no children playing in the park any more, nor a master of the household saddling his horse in the courtyard.

She looked back at the cutting from the Paris glossy society magazine that her friend had so thoughtfully mailed to her; at the face of her husband grinning inanely into the flash-bulb, eyes torn between the lens of the camera and the jutting bosom of the starlet over whose shoulder he was peering. A cabaret dancer, risen from bar hostess, quoted as saying she hoped ‘one day’ to be able to marry the Baron, who was her ‘very good friend’.

Looking at the lined face and scrawny neck of the ageing Baron in the photograph, she wondered vaguely what had happened to the handsome young captain of the Resistance partisans with whom she had fallen in love in 1942 and married a year later when she was expecting her son.

She had been a teenage girl, running messages for the Resistance, when she met him in the mountains. He had been in his mid-thirties, known by the code-name of Pegasus, a lean, hawk-faced commanding man who had turned her heart. They had been married in a secret ceremony in a cellar chapel by a priest of the Resistance, and she had borne her son in her father’s house.

Then after the war had come the restoration of all his lands and properties. His father had died of a heart attack when the Allied armies swept across France, and he had emerged from the heather to become the Baron of Chalonnière, cheered by the peasantry of the countryside as he brought his wife and son back to the château. Soon the estates had tired him, the lure of Paris and the lights of the cabarets, the urge to make up for the lost years of his manhood in the undergrowth had proved too strong to resist.

Now he was fifty-seven and could have passed for seventy.

The Baroness threw the cutting and its accompanying letter on the floor. She jumped out of bed and stood in front of the full-length mirror on the far wall, pulling open the laces that held the peignoir together down the front. She stood on tiptoe to tighten the muscles of her thighs as a pair of high-heeled shoes would do.

Not bad, she thought. Could be a lot worse. A full figure, the body of a mature woman. The hips were wide, but the waist had mercifully remained in proportion, firmed by hours in the saddle and long walks in the hills. She cupped her breasts one in each hand and measured their weight. Too big, too heavy for real beauty, but still enough to excite a man in bed.

Well, Alfred, two can play at that game, she thought. She shook her head, loosening the shoulder-length black hair so that a strand fell forward by her cheek and lay across one of her breasts. She took her hands away and ran them between her thighs, thinking of the man who had been there just over twenty-four hours before. He had been good. She wished now she had stayed on at Gap. Perhaps they could have holidayed together, driving round using a false name, like runaway lovers. What on earth had she come home for?

There was a clatter of an old van drawing up in the courtyard. Idly she drew the peignoir together and walked to the window that gave on to the front of the house. A van from the village was parked there, the rear doors open. Two men were at the back taking something down from the tailboard. Louison was walking across from where he had been weeding one of the ornamental lawns to help carry the load.

One of the men hidden behind the van walked round to the front, stuffing some paper into his trouser pocket, climbed into the driving seat and engaged the grinding clutch. Who was delivering things to the château? She had not ordered anything. The van started to pull away and she gave a start of surprise. There were three suitcases and a hand-grip on the gravel, beside them was a man. She recognised the gleam of the blond hair in the sun and smiled wide with pleasure.

‘You animal. You beautiful primitive animal. You followed me.’

She hurried into the bathroom to dress.

When she came on to the landing she caught the sound of voices in the hall below. Ernestine was asking what Monsieur wanted.

‘Madame la Baronne, elle est là?’

In a moment Ernestine came hurrying up the stairs as fast as her old legs would carry her. ‘A gentleman has called, ma’am.’

The evening meeting in the Ministry that Friday was shorter than usual. The only thing to report was that there was nothing. For the past twenty-four hours the description of the wanted car had been circulated in a routine manner, so as not to arouse undue suspicion, throughout France. It had not been spotted. Similarly every Regional Headquarters of the Police Judiciaire had ordered its dependent local commissariats in town and country to get all hotel registration cards into HQ by eight in the morning at the latest. At the Regional HQs they were immediately scoured, tens of thousands of them, for the name of Duggan. Nothing had been spotted. Therefore, he had not stayed last night in a hotel, at least, not in the name of Duggan.

‘We have to accept one of two premises,’ explained Lebel to a silent gathering. ‘Either he still believes he is unsuspected, in other words his departure from the Hôtel du Cerf was an unpremeditated action and a coincidence; in which case there is no reason for him not to use his Alfa Romeo openly and stay openly in hotels under the name of Duggan. In that case he must be spotted sooner or later. In the second case he has decided to ditch the car somewhere and abandon it, and rely on his own resources. In the latter case, there are a further two possibilities.

‘Either he has no further false identities on which to rely; in which case he cannot get far without registering at a hotel or trying to pass a frontier point on his way out of France. Or he has another identity and has passed into it. In the latter case he is still extremely dangerous.’

‘What makes you think he might have another identity?’ asked Colonel Rolland.

‘We have to assume,’ said Lebel, ‘that this man, having been offered evidently a very large sum by the OAS to carry out this assassination, must be one of the best professional killers in the world. That implies that he has had experience. And yet he has managed to stay clear of any official suspicion, and all official police dossiers. The only way he could do this would be by carrying out his assignments in a false name and with a false appearance. In other words, an expert in disguise as well.

‘We know from the comparison of the two photographs that Calthrop was able to extend his height by high-heeled shoes, slim off several kilos in weight, change his eye colour by contact lenses and his hair colour with dye to become Duggan. If he can do that once, we cannot afford the luxury of assuming he cannot do it again.’

‘But there’s no reason to suppose he suspected he would be exposed before he got close to the President,’ protested Saint-Clair. ‘Why should he take such elaborate precautions as to have one or more false identities?’

‘Because,’ said Lebel, ‘he apparently does take elaborate precautions. If he did not, we should have had him by now.’

‘I note from Calthrop’s dossier, as passed on by the British police, that he did his National Service just after the war in the parachute regiment. Perhaps he’s using this experience to live rough, hiding out in the hills,’ suggested Max Fernet.

‘Perhaps,’ agreed Lebel.

‘In that case he is more or less finished as a potential danger.’

Lebel considered for a moment.

‘Of this particular person, I would not like to say that until he is behind bars.’

‘Or dead,’ said Rolland.

‘If he’s got any sense, he’ll be trying to get out of France while he’s still alive,’ said Saint-Clair.

On that note the meeting broke up.

‘I wish I could count on that,’ Lebel told Caron back in the office. ‘But as far as I’m concerned he’s alive, well, free and armed. We keep on looking for him and that car. He had three pieces of luggage, he can’t have got far on foot with all that. Find that car and we start from there.’

The man they wanted was lying on fresh linen in a château in the heart of Corrèze. He was bathed and relaxed, filled with a meal of country pâté and jugged hare, washed down with rough red wine, black coffee and brandy. He stared up at the gilt curlicues that writhed across the ceiling and planned the course of the days that now separated him from his assignment in Paris. In a week, he thought, he would have to move, and getting away might prove difficult. But it could be done. He would have to think out a reason for going.

The door opened and the Baroness came in. Her hair had been let down around her shoulders and she wore a peignoir held together at the throat but open down the front. As she moved it swayed briefly open. She was quite naked beneath it, but had kept on the stockings she had worn at dinner and the high-heeled court shoes. The Jackal propped himself up on one elbow as she closed the door and walked over to the bed.

She looked down at him in silence. He reached up and slipped loose the bow of ribbon that held the nightdress closed at the throat. It swung open to reveal the breasts, and as he craned forward his hand slid the lace-edged material off her shoulders. It slid down to the floor without a sound.

She pushed his shoulder so that he rolled back on to the bed, then gripped his wrists and pinned them against the pillow as she climbed over him. He stared back up at her as she knelt above him, her thighs gripping his ribs hard. She smiled down at him, two curling strands of hair falling down to the nipples.

‘Bon, my primitif, now let’s see you perform.’

He eased his head forward as her bottom rose off his chest, and started.

For three days the trail went cold for Lebel, and at each evening meeting the volume of opinion that the Jackal had left France secretly with his tail between his legs increased. By the meeting on the evening of the 19th he was alone in maintaining his view that the killer was still somewhere in France, lying low and biding his time, waiting.

‘Waiting for what?’ shrilled Saint-Clair that evening. ‘The only thing he can be waiting for, if he is still here, is an opportunity to make a dash for the border. The moment he breaks cover we have got him. He has every man’s arm against him, nowhere to go, no one to take him in, if your supposition that he is completely cut off from the OAS and their sympathisers is correct.’

There was a murmur of assent from the table, most of whose members were beginning to harden in their opinion that the police had failed, and that Bouvier’s original dictum that the location of the killer was a purely detective task had been wrong.

Lebel shook his head doggedly. He was tired, exhausted by lack of sleep, by strain and worry, by having to defend himself and his staff from the constant needling attacks of men who owed their exalted positions to politics rather than experience. He had enough sense to realise that if he was wrong, he was finished. Some of the men round the table would see to that. And if he was right? If the Jackal was still on the trail of the President? If he slipped through the net and closed with his victim? He knew those round the table would desperately seek for a scapegoat. And it would be him. Either way his long career as a policeman was ended. Unless … unless he could find the man and stop him. Only then would they have to concede that he had been right. But he had no proof; only an odd faith, that he could certainly never divulge, that the man he was hunting was another professional who would carry out his job no matter what.

Over the eight days since this affair had landed on his lap he had come to a grudging respect for the silent unpredictable man with the gun who seemed to have everything planned down to the last detail, including the contingency planning. It was as much as his career was worth to admit his feelings amidst the gathering of political appointees around him. Only the massive bulk of Bouvier beside him, hunching his head into his shoulders and glaring at the table, gave him a small comfort. At least he was another detective.

‘Waiting for I don’t know what,’ Lebel replied. ‘But he’s waiting for something, or some appointed day. I do not believe gentlemen, that we have heard the last of the Jackal yet. All the same, I cannot explain why I feel this.’

‘Feelings!’ jeered Saint-Clair. ‘Some appointed day!! Really, Commissaire, you seem to have been reading too many romantic thrillers. This is no romance, my dear sir, this is reality. The man has gone, that’s all there is to it.’ He sat back with a self-assured smile.

‘I hope you are right,’ said Lebel quietly. ‘In that case, I must tender to you, Monsieur le Ministre, my willingness to withdraw from the enquiry and return to the investigation of crime.’

The Minister eyed him with indecision.

‘Do you think the enquiry is worth pursuing, Commissaire?’ he asked. ‘Do you think a real danger still subsists?’

‘As to the second question, sir, I do not know. For the former, I believe we should go on looking until we are absolutely certain.’

‘Very well then. Gentlemen, it is my wish that the Commissaire continue his enquiries, and that we continue our evening meetings to hear his reports—for the moment.’

On the morning of August 20th Marcange Callet, a gamekeeper, was shooting vermin on the estates of his employer between Egletons and Ussel in the department of Corrèze when he pursued a wounded wood-pigeon that had tumbled into a clump of wild rhododendron. In the centre of the clump he found the pigeon, fluttering madly on the driving seat of an open sports car that had evidently been abandoned.

At first he thought as he wrung the bird’s neck that it must have been parked by a pair of lovers who had come into the forest for a picnic, despite the warning notice that he had nailed up on the pole at the entrance to the woods half a mile away. Then he noticed that some of the branches of shrubbery that concealed the car from view were not growing in the ground but had been jabbed into the earth. Further examination showed the cut stumps of the branches on other nearby bushes, the white cuts having been smeared over with earth to darken them.

From the bird droppings on the seats of the car he reckoned it had been there for several days at least. Taking his gun and bird he cycled back through the woods to his cottage, making a mental note to mention the car to the local village constable when he went into the village later that morning to buy some more rabbit snares.

It was nearly noon when the village policeman wound up the hand-cranked telephone in his house and filed a report to the commissariat at Ussel to the effect that a car had been found abandoned in the woods nearby. Was it a white car, he was asked. He consulted his notebook. No, it was a blue car. Was it Italian? No, it was French-registered, make unknown. Right, said the voice from Ussel, a towaway truck will be sent during the afternoon, and he had better be ready waiting to guide the crew to the spot, because there was a lot of work on and everyone was short-staffed, what with a search going on for a white Italian sports car that the bigwigs in Paris wanted to have a look at. The village constable promised to be ready and waiting when the towaway truck arrived.

It was not until after four that afternoon that the little car was towed into the pound at Ussel, and close to five before one of the motor maintenance staff, giving the car a check over for identification, noticed that the paintwork was appallingly badly done.

He took out a screwdriver and scratched at one of the wings. Under the blue, a streak of white appeared. Perplexed, he examined the number plates, and noticed that they seemed to have been reversed. A few minutes later the front plate was lying in the courtyard face up, exhibiting white lettering MI-61741, and the policeman was hurrying across the yard towards the office.

Claude Lebel got the news just before six. It came from Commissaire Valentin of the Regional Headquarters of the PJ at Clermont Ferrand, capital of the Auvergne. Lebel jerked upright in his chair as Valentin’s voice started talking.

‘Right, listen, this is important. I can’t explain why it’s important, I can only say that it is. Yes, I know it’s irregular, but that’s the way it is. I know you’re a full Commissaire, my dear chap, but if you want confirmation of my authority in this case I’ll pass you right on to the Director-General of the PJ.

‘I want you to get a team down to Ussel now. The best you can get, and as many men as you can get. Start enquiring from the spot where the car was found. Mark off the map with that spot in the centre and prepare for a square search. Ask at every farmhouse, every farmer who regularly drives along that road, every village store and café, every hotel and woodcutter’s shack.

‘You are looking for a tall blond man, English by birth but speaking good French. He was carrying three suitcases and a hand-grip. He carries a lot of money in cash and is well dressed, but probably looking as if he had slept rough.

‘Your men must ask where he was, where he went, what he tried to buy. Oh, and one other thing, the Press must be kept out at all costs. What do you mean, they can’t? Well of course the local stringers will ask what goes on. Well, tell them there was a car crash and it’s thought one of the occupants might be wandering in a dazed state. Yes, all right, a mission of mercy. Anything, just allay their suspicions. Tell them there’s no story the national papers would bother to pay for, not in the holiday season with five hundred road accidents a day. Just play it down. And one last thing, if you locate the man holed up somewhere, don’t get near him. Just surround him and keep him there. I’ll be down as soon as I can.’

Lebel put the phone down and turned to Caron.

‘Get on to the Minister. Ask him to bring the evening meeting forward to eight o’clock. I know that’s supper time, but it will only be short. Then get on to Satory and get the helicopter again. A night flight, to Ussel, and they’d better tell us where they will be landing so we can get a car laid on to pick me up. You’ll have to take over here.’

The police vans from Clermont Ferrand, backed up by others contributed by Ussel, set up their headquarters in the village square of the tiny hamlet nearest to where the car had been found, just as the sun was setting. From the radio van Valentin issued instructions to the scores of squad cars converging on the other villages of the area. He had decided to start with a five-mile radius of the spot where the car was found, and work through the night. People were more likely to be home in the hours of darkness. On the other hand, in the twisting valleys and hillsides of the region, there was more chance that in the darkness his men would get lost, or overlook some small woodcutter’s shack where the fugitive might be hiding.

There was one other factor that he could not have explained to Paris over the phone, and which he dreaded having to explain to Lebel face to face. Unbeknown to him, some of his men came across this factor before midnight. A group of them were interviewing a farmer in his cottage two miles from the spot where the car was found.

He stood in the doorway in his nightshirt, pointedly refusing to invite the detectives in. From his hand the paraffin lamp cast flickering splashes of light over the group.

‘Come on, Gaston, you drive along that road to market pretty often. Did you drive down that road towards Egletons on Friday morning?’

The peasant surveyed them through narrowed eyes.

‘Might have done.’

‘Well, did you or didn’t you?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘Did you see a man on the road?’

‘I mind my own business.’

‘That’s not what we’re asking. Did you see a man?’

‘I saw nobody, nothing.’

‘A blond man, tall, athletic. Carrying three suitcases and a hand-grip?’

‘I saw nothing. J’ai rien vu, tu comprends.’

It went on for twenty minutes. At last they went, one of the detectives making a meticulous note in his book. The dogs snarled on the ends of their chains and snapped at the policemen’s legs, causing them to skip to one side and step in the compost heap. The peasant watched them until they were back on the road and jolting away in their car. Then he slammed the door, kicked an inquisitive goat out of the way and clambered back into bed with his wife.

‘That was the fellow you gave a lift to, wasn’t it?’ she asked. ‘What do they want with him?’

‘Dunno,’ said Gaston, ‘but no one will ever say Gaston Grosjean helped give away another creature to them.’ He hawked and spat into the embers of the fire. ‘Sales flics.’

He turned down the wick and blew out the light, swung his legs off the floor and pushed further into the cot against the ample form of his wife. ‘Good luck to you, mate, wherever you are.’

*

Lebel faced the meeting and put down his papers.

‘As soon as this meeting is over, gentlemen, I am flying down to Ussel to supervise the search myself.’

There was silence for nearly a minute.

‘What do you think, Commissaire, that can be deduced from this?’

‘Two things, Monsieur le Ministre. We know he must have bought paint to transform the car, and I suspect enquiries will show that if the car was driven through the night from Thursday into Friday morning from Gap to Ussel, that it was already transformed. In that case, and enquiries along these lines are proceeding, it would appear he bought the paint in Gap. If that is so, then he was tipped off. Either somebody rang him, or he rang somebody, either here or in London, who told him of the discovery of his pseudonym of Duggan. From that he could work out that we would be on to him before noon, and on to his car. So he got out, and fast.’

He thought the elegant ceiling of the conference room was going to crack, so pressing was the silence.

‘Are you seriously suggesting,’ somebody asked from a million miles away, ‘there is a leak from within this room?’

‘I cannot say that, monsieur. There are switchboard operators, telex operators, middle and junior level executives to whom orders have to be passed. It could be that one of them is clandestinally an OAS agent. But one thing seems to emerge ever more clearly. He was tipped off about the unmasking of the overall plan to assassinate the President of France, and decided to go ahead regardless. And he was tipped off about his unmasking as Alexander Duggan. He has after all got one single contact. I suspect it might be the man known as Valmy whose message to Rome was intercepted by the DST.’

‘Damn,’ swore the head of the DST, ‘we should have got the blighter in the post office.’

‘And what is the second thing we may deduce, Commissaire?’ asked the Minister.

‘The second thing is that when he learned he was blown as Duggan, he did not seek to quit France. On the contrary, he headed right into the centre of France. In other words, he is still on the trail of the head of state. He has simply challenged the whole lot of us.’

The Minister rose and gathered his papers.

‘We will not detain you, M. le Commissaire. Find him. Find him, and tonight. Dispose of him if you have to. Those are my orders, in the name of the President.’

With that he stalked from the room.

An hour later Lebel’s helicopter lifted away from the take-off pad at Satory and headed through the purpling-black sky towards the south.

‘Impertinent pig. How dare he. Suggesting that somehow we, the topmost officials of France, were at fault. I shall mention it, of course, in my next report.’

Jacqueline eased the thin straps of her slip from her shoulders and let the transparent material fall to settle in folds round her hips. Tightening her biceps to push the breasts together with a deep cleavage down the middle, she took her lover’s head and pulled it towards her bosom.

‘Tell me all about it,’ she cooed.

18

THE MORNING OF August 21st was as bright and clear as the previous fourteen of that summer heat-wave had been. From the windows of the Château de la Haute Chalonnière, looking out over a rolling vista of heather-clad hills, it looked calm and peaceful, giving no hint of the tumult of police enquiries that was even then enveloping the town of Egletons eighteen kilometres away.

The Jackal, naked under his dressing gown, stood at the windows of the Baron’s study making his routine morning call to Paris. He had left his mistress asleep upstairs after another night of ferocious lovemaking.

When the connection came through he began as usual ‘Ici Chacal’.

‘Ici Valmy’ said the husky voice at the other end. ‘Things have started to move again. They have found the car …’

He listened for another two minutes, interrupting only with a terse question. With a final ‘merci’ he replaced the receiver and fumbled in his pockets for cigarettes and lighter. What he had just heard, he realised, changed his plans whether he liked it or not. He had wanted to stay on at the château for another two days, but now he had to leave, and the sooner the better. There was something else about the phone call that worried him, something that should not have been there.

He had thought nothing of it at the time, but as he drew on his cigarette it niggled at the back of his mind. It came to him without effort as he finished the cigarette and threw the stub through the open window on to the gravel. There had been a soft click on the line soon after he had picked up the receiver. That had not happened during the phone calls over the past three days. There was an extension phone in the bedroom, but surely Colette had been fast asleep when he left her. Surely … He turned and strode briskly up the stairs on silent bare feet and burst into the bedroom.

The phone had been replaced on its cradle. The wardrobe was open and the three suitcases lay about the floor, all open. His own keyring with the keys that opened the suitcases lay nearby. The Baroness, on her knees amid the debris, looked up with wide staring eyes. Around her lay a series of slim steel tubes, from each of which the hessian caps that closed the open ends had been removed. From one emerged the end of a telescopic sight, from another the snout of the silencer. She held something in her hands, something she had been gazing at in horror when he entered. It was the barrel and breech of the gun.

For several seconds neither spoke. The Jackal recovered first.

‘You were listening.’

‘I … wondered who you were phoning each morning like that.’

‘I thought you were asleep.’

‘No. I always wake when you get out of bed. This … thing; it’s a gun, a killer’s gun.’

It was half question, half statement, but as if hoping he would explain that it was simply something else, something quite harmless. He looked down at her, and for the first time she noticed that the grey flecks in the eyes had spread and clouded over the whole expression, which had become dead and lifeless like a machine staring down at her.

She rose slowly to her feet, dropping the gun barrel with a clatter among the other components.

‘You want to kill him,’ she whispered. ‘You are one of them, the OAS. You want to use this to kill de Gaulle.’

The lack of any answer from the Jackal gave her the answer. She made a rush for the door. He caught her easily and hurled her back across the room on to the bed, coming after her in three fast paces. As she bounced on the rumpled sheets her mouth opened to scream. The back-handed blow across the side of the neck into the carotid artery choked off the scream at source, then his left hand was tangled in her hair, dragging her face downwards over the edge of the bed. She caught a last glimpse of the pattern of the carpet when the forehanded chop with the edge of the palm came down on the back of the neck.

He went to the door to listen, but no sound came from below. Ernestine would be preparing the morning rolls and coffee in the kitchen at the back of the house and Louison should be on his way to market shortly. Fortunately both were rather deaf.

He re-packed the parts of the rifle in their tubes and the tubes in the third suitcase with the army greatcoat and soiled clothes of André Martin, patting the lining to make sure the papers had not been disturbed. Then he locked the case. The second case, containing the clothes of the Danish pastor Per Jensen, was unlocked but had not been searched.

He spent five minutes washing and shaving in the bathroom that adjoined the bedroom. Then he took his scissors and spent a further ten minutes carefully combing the long blond hair upwards and snipping off the last two inches. Next he brushed into it enough of the hair tint to turn it into a middle-aged man’s iron-grey. The effect of the dye was to dampen the hair, enabling him finally to brush it into the type shown in Pastor Jensen’s passport, which he had propped on top of the bathroom shelf. Finally he slipped on the blue-tinted contact lenses.

He wiped every trace of the hair tint and washing preparations off the washbasin, collected up the shaving things and returned to the bedroom. The naked body on the floor he ignored.

He dressed in the vest, pants, socks and shirt he had bought in Copenhagen, fixed the black bib round his neck and topped it with the parson’s dog collar. Finally he slipped on the black suit and conventional walking shoes. He tucked the gold-rimmed glasses into his top pocket, re-packed the washing things in the hand-grip and put the Danish book on French cathedrals in there as well. Into the inside pocket of his suit he transferred the Dane’s passport, and a wad of money.

The remainder of his English clothes went back into the suitcase from which they had come, and this too was finally locked.

It was nearly eight when he finished and Ernestine would be coming up shortly with the morning coffee. The Baroness had tried to keep their affair from the servants, for both had doted on the Baron when he had been a small boy and later the master of the house.

From the window he watched Louison cycle down the broad path that led towards the gates of the estate, his shopping pannier jolting along behind the bicycle. At that moment he heard Ernestine knock at the door. He made no sound. She knocked again.

‘Y a vot’ café, madame,’ she shrilled through the closed door. Making up his mind, the Jackal called out in French, in a tone half asleep,

‘Leave it there. We’ll pick it up when we’re ready.’

Outside the door Ernestine’s mouth formed a perfect ‘O’. Scandalous. Whatever were things coming to … and in the Master’s bedroom. She hurried downstairs to find Louison, but as he had left had to content herself with giving a lengthy lecture to the kitchen sink on the depravity of people nowadays, not at all like what the old Baron had been used to. So she did not hear the soft thud as four cases, lowered from the bedroom window on a looped sheet, plumped into the flowerbed on the front of the house.

Nor did she hear the bedroom door locked from the inside, the limp body of her mistress arranged in a natural sleeping position on the bed with the clothes tucked up to the chin, the snap of the bedroom window as it shut behind the grey-haired man crouching outside on the sill, nor the thud as he dropped in a clean fall down to the lawn.

She did hear the roar as Madame’s Renault was gunned into life in the converted stable at the side of the château and peering through the scullery window she caught a glimpse as it swung round into the driveway leading to the front courtyard and away down the drive.

‘Now what is that young lady up to?’ she muttered as she scuttled back upstairs.

In front of the bedroom door the tray of coffee was still lukewarm but untouched. After knocking several times, she tried the door but it would not open. The gentleman’s bedroom door was also locked. Nobody would answer her. Ernestine decided there were goings-on, the sort of goings-on that had not happened since the Boche came to stay as guests of the unwilling Baron back in the old days and ask him silly questions about the Young Master.

She decided to consult Louison. He would be at market, and someone in the local café would go to fetch him. She did not understand the telephone, but believed that if you picked it up people spoke to you and went and found the person you really wanted to speak to. But it was all nonsense. She picked it up and held it for ten minutes but no one spoke to her. She failed to notice the neat slice through the cord where it joined the skirting board of the library.

Claude Lebel took the helicopter back to Paris shortly after breakfast. As he said later to Caron, Valentin had been doing a first-class job, despite the obstructions of those damned peasants. By breakfast time he had traced the Jackal to a café in Egletons where he had had breakfast, and was looking for a taxi-driver who had been summoned. Meanwhile he had arranged for road blocks to be erected in a twenty-kilometre radius around Egletons, and they should be in place by midday.

Because of the calibre of Valentin he had given him a hint of the importance of finding the Jackal, and Valentin had agreed to put a ring round Egletons, in his own words ‘tighter than a mouse’s arsehole’.

From Haute Chalonnière the little Renault sped off through the mountains heading south towards Tulle. The Jackal estimated that if the police had been enquiring since the previous evening in ever-widening circles from where the Alfa had been found they must have reached Egletons by dawn. The café barman would talk, the taxi-driver would talk, and they would be at the château by the afternoon, unless he had a lucky break.

But even then they would be looking for a blond Englishman, for he had taken good care that no one had seen him as a grey-haired priest. All the same, it was going to be a close-run thing. He whipped the little car through the mountain byways, finally emerging on to the RN8 eighteen kilometres south-west of Egletons on the road to Tulle, which lay another twenty kilometres ahead. He checked his watch: twenty to ten.

As he vanished round a bend at the end of a stretch of straight, a small convoy came buzzing down from Egletons. It comprised a police squad car and two closed vans. The convoy stopped in the middle of the straight, and six policemen started to erect a steel road block.

‘What do you mean, he’s out?’ roared Valentin to the weeping wife of a taxi-driver in Egletons. ‘Where did he go?’

‘I don’t know, monsieur. I don’t know. He waits every morning at the station square when the morning train comes in from Ussel. If there are no passengers he comes back here to the garage and gets on with some repair work. If he does not come back it means he has picked up a fare.’

Valentin looked around gloomily. It was no use bawling out the woman. It was a one-man taxi business run by a fellow who also did a bit of repair work on cars.

‘Did he take anyone anywhere on Friday morning?’ he asked, more patiently.

‘Yes, monsieur. He had come back from the station because there was no one there, and a call from the café that somebody there wanted a taxi. He had got one of the wheels off, and was worried in case the customer should leave and go in another taxi. So he was cussing all through the twenty minutes it took to put the wheel back on. Then he left. He got the fare, but he never said where he took him.’ She snuffled. ‘He doesn’t talk to me much,’ she added by way of explanation.

Valentin patted her on the shoulder.

‘All right, madame. Don’t upset yourself. We’ll wait till he gets back.’ He turned to one of the sergeants. ‘Get a man to the main station, another to the square, to the café. You know the number of that taxi. The moment he shows up I want to see him—fast.’

He left the garage and strode to his car.

‘The commissariat,’ he said. He had transferred the headquarters of the search to Egletons police station, which had not seen activity like it in years.

In a ravine six miles outside Tulle the Jackal dumped the suitcase containing all his English clothes and the passport of Alexander Duggan. It had served him well. The case plummeted over the parapet of the bridge and vanished with a crash into the dense undergrowth at the foot of the gorge.

After circling Tulle and finding the station, he parked the car unobtrusively three streets away and carried his two suitcases and grip the half-mile to the railway booking office.

‘I would like a single ticket to Paris, second class please,’ he told the clerk. ‘How much is that?’ He peered over his glasses and through the little grille into the cubbyhole where the clerk worked.

‘Ninety-seven new francs, monsieur.’

‘And what time is the next train please?’

‘Eleven-fifty. You’ve got nearly an hour to wait. There’s a restaurant down the platform. Platform One for Paris, je vous en prie.’

The Jackal picked up his luggage and headed for the barrier. The ticket was clipped, he picked up the cases again and walked through. His path was barred by a blue uniform.

‘Vos papiers, s’il vous plaît.’

The CRS man was young, trying to look sterner than his years would allow. He carried a submachine carbine slung over his shoulder. The Jackal put down his luggage again and proffered his Danish passport. The CRS man flicked through it, not understanding a word.

‘Vous êtes Danois?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Vous … Danois.’ He tapped the cover of the passport.

The Jackal beamed and nodded in delight.

‘Danske … ja, ja.’

The CRS man handed the passport back and jerked his head towards the platform. Without further interest he stepped forward to bar passage to another traveller coming through the barrier.

It was not until nearly one o’clock that Louison came back, and he had had a glass of wine or two. His distraught wife poured out her tale of woe. Louison took the matter in hand.

‘I shall,’ he announced, ‘mount to the window and look in.’

He had trouble with the ladder to start with. It kept wanting to go its own way. But eventually it was propped against the brickwork beneath the window of the Baroness’s bedroom and Louison made his unsteady way to the top. He came down five minutes later.

‘Madame la Baronne is asleep,’ he announced.

‘But she never sleeps this late,’ protested Ernestine.

‘Well, she is doing today,’ replied Louison, ‘one must not disturb her.’

The Paris train was slightly late. It arrived at Tulle on the dot of one o’clock. Among the passengers who boarded it was a grey-haired Protestant pastor. He took a corner seat in a compartment inhabited only by two middle-aged women, put on a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses, took a large book on churches and cathedrals from his hand-grip, and started to read. The arrival time at Paris, he learned, was ten past eight that evening.

Charles Bobet stood on the roadside next to his immobilised taxi, looked at his watch and swore. Half past one, time for lunch, and here he was stuck on a lonely stretch of road between Egletons and the hamlet of Lamazière. With a busted half-shaft. Merde and merde again. He could leave the car and try to walk to the next village, take a bus into Egletons and return in the evening with a repair truck. That alone would cost him a week’s earnings. But then again the car doors had no locks, and his fortune was tied up in the rattletrap taxi. Better not leave it for those thieving village kids to ransack. Better to be a little patient and wait until a lorry came along that could (for a consideration) tow him back to Egletons. He had had no lunch, but there was a bottle of wine in the glove compartment. Well, it was almost empty now. Crawling around under taxis was thirsty work. He climbed into the back of the car to wait. It was extremely hot on the roadside, and no lorries would be moving until the day had cooled a little. The peasants would be taking their siesta. He made himself comfortable and fell fast asleep.

‘What do you mean he’s not back yet? Where’s the bugger gone?’ roared Commissaire Valentin down the telephone. He was sitting in the commissariat at Egletons, ringing the house of the taxi-driver and speaking to his own policeman. The babble of the voice on the other end was apologetic. Valentin slammed the phone down. All morning and through the lunch-hour radio reports had come in from the squad cars manning the road blocks. No one remotely resembling a tall blond Englishman had left the twenty-kilometre-radius circle round Egletons. Now the sleepy market town was silent in the summer heat, dozing blissfully as if the two hundred policemen from Ussel and Clermont Ferrand had never descended upon it.

It was not until four o’clock that Ernestine got her way.

‘You must go up there again and wake Madame,’ she urged Louison. ‘It’s not natural for anyone to sleep right through the day.’

Old Louison, who could think of nothing better than to be able to do just that, and whose mouth tasted like a vulture’s crotch, disagreed, but knew there was no use in arguing with Ernestine when her mind was made up. He ascended the ladder again, this time more steadily than before, eased up the window and stepped inside. Ernestine watched from below.

After a few minutes the old man’s head came out of the window.

‘Ernestine,’ he called hoarsely, ‘Madame seems to be dead.’

He was about to climb back down again when Ernestine screamed at him to open the bedroom door from the inside. Together they peered over the edge of the coverlet at the eyes staring blankly at the pillow a few inches away from the face.

Ernestine took over.

‘Louison.’

‘Yes, my dear.’

‘Hurry down to the village and fetch Dr Mathieu. Hurry now.’

A few minutes later Louison was pedalling down the drive with all the force his frightened legs could muster. He found Dr Mathieu, who had tended the ills of the people of Haute Chalonnière for over forty years, asleep under the apricot tree at the bottom of his garden, and the old man agreed to come at once. It was past four-thirty when his car clattered into the courtyard of the château and fifteen minutes later when he straightened up from the bed and turned round on the two retainers who stood in the doorway.

‘Madame is dead. Her neck has been broken,’ he quavered. ‘We must fetch the constable.’

Gendarme Caillou was a methodical man. He knew how serious was the job of an officer of the law, and how important it was to get the facts straight. With much licking of his pencil he took statements from Ernestine, Louison and Dr Mathieu as they sat around the kitchen table.

‘There is no doubt,’ he said, when the doctor had signed his statement, ‘that murder has been done. The first suspect is evidently the blond Englishman who has been staying here, and who has disappeared in Madame’s car. I shall report the matter to headquarters in Egletons.’

And he cycled back down the hill.

Claude Lebel rang Commissaire Valentin from Paris at six-thirty.

‘Alors, Valentin?’

‘Nothing yet,’ replied Valentin. ‘We’ve had road blocks up on every road and track leading out of the area since mid-morning. He must be inside the circle somewhere, unless he moved far away after ditching the car. That thrice-damned taxi-driver who drove him out of Egletons on Friday morning has not turned up yet. I’ve got patrols scouring the roads around here for him … Hold it a minute, another report just coming in.’

There was a pause on the line and Lebel could hear Valentin conferring with someone who was speaking quickly. Then Valentin’s voice came back on the line.

‘Name of a dog, what’s going on round here? There’s been a murder.’

‘Where?’ asked Lebel with quickened interest.

‘At a château in the neighbourhood. The report has just come in from the village constable.’

‘Who’s the dead person?’

‘The owner of the château. A woman. Hold on a moment … The Baroness de la Chalonnière.’

Caron watched Lebel go pale.

‘Valentin, listen to me. It’s him. Has he got away from the château yet?’

There was another conference in the police station at Egletons.

‘Yes,’ said Valentin, ‘he drove away this morning in the Baroness’s car. A small Renault. The gardener discovered the body, but not until this afternoon. He thought she must have been sleeping. Then he climbed through the window and found her.’

‘Have you got the number and description of the car?’ asked Lebel.

‘Yes.’

‘Then put out a general alert. There’s no need for secrecy any more. It’s a straight murder hunt now. I’ll put out a nationwide alert for it, but try and pick up the trail near the scene of the crime if you can. Try to get his general direction of flight.’

‘Right, will do. Now we can really get started.’

Lebel hung up.

‘Dear God, I’m getting slow in my old age. The name of the Baroness de la Chalonnière was on the guest list at the Hôtel du Cerf the night the Jackal stayed there.’

The car was found in a back street in Tulle at 7.30 by a policeman on the beat. It was 7.45 before he was back in the police station at Tulle and 7.55 before Tulle had contacted Valentin. The Commissaire of Auvergne rang Lebel at 8.05.

‘About five hundred metres from the railway station,’ he told Lebel.

‘Have you got a railway timetable there?’

‘Yes, there should be one here somewhere.’

‘What was the time of the morning train to Paris from Tulle, and what time is it due at the Gare d’Austerlitz? Hurry, for God’s sake hurry.’

There was a murmured conversation at the Egletons end of the line.

‘Only two a day,’ said Valentin. ‘The morning train left at eleven-fifty and is due in Paris at … here we are, ten past eight …’

Lebel left the phone hanging and was halfway out of the office yelling at Caron to follow him.

The eight-ten express steamed majestically into the Gare d’Austerlitz precisely on time. It had hardly stopped when the doors down its gleaming length were flung open and the passengers were spilling on to the platform, some to be greeted by waiting relatives, others to stride towards the series of arches that led from the main hall into the taxi-rank. One of these was a tall grey-haired person in a dog collar. He was one of the first at the taxi-rank, and humped his three bags into the back of a Mercedes diesel.

The driver slammed the meter over and eased away from the entrance to slide down the incline towards the street. The forecourt had a semicircular driveway, with one gate for coming and one for going out. The taxi rolled down the slope towards the exit. Both driver and passenger became aware of a wailing sound rising over and above the clamour of passengers trying to attract the attention of taxi-drivers before their turn had arrived. As the taxi reached the level of the street and paused before entering the traffic, three squad cars and two Black Marias swept into the entrance and drew to a halt before the main arches leading to the station hall.

‘Huh, they’re busy tonight, the sods,’ said the taxi-driver. ‘Where to, Monsieur l’Abbé?’

The parson gave him the address of a small hotel on the Quai des Grands Augustins.

Claude Lebel was back in his office at nine o’clock, to find a message asking him to ring Commissaire Valentin at the commissariat in Tulle. He was through in five minutes. While Valentin talked, he took notes.

‘Have you fingerprinted the car?’ asked Lebel.

‘Of course, and the room at the château. Hundreds of sets, all matching.’

‘Get them up here as fast as you can.’

‘Right, will do. Do you want me to send the CRS man from Tulle railway station up as well?’

‘No, thanks, he can’t tell us more than he already has. Thanks for trying, Valentin. You can stand your boys down. He’s in our territory now. We’ll have to handle it from here.’

‘You’re sure it is the Danish pastor?’ asked Valentin. ‘It could be coincidence.’

‘No,’ said Lebel, ‘it’s him all right. He’s junked one of the suitcases, you’ll probably find it somewhere between Haute Chalonnière and Tulle. Try the rivers and ravines. But the other three pieces of luggage match too closely. It’s him all right.’

He hung up.

‘A parson this time,’ he said bitterly to Caron, ‘a Danish parson. Name unknown, the CRS man couldn’t remember the name on the passport. The human element, always the human element. A taxi-driver goes to sleep by the roadside, a gardener is too nervous to investigate his employer oversleeping by six hours, a policeman doesn’t remember a name in a passport. One thing I can tell you, Lucien, this is my last case. I’m getting too old. Old and slow. Get my car ready, would you. Time for the evening roasting.’

The meeting at the Ministry was strained and tense. For forty minutes the group listened to a step by step account of the trail from the forest clearing to Egletons, the absence of the vital taxi-driver, the murder in the château, the tall grey Dane boarding the Paris express at Tulle.

‘The long and the short of it,’ said Saint-Clair icily, when he had finished, ‘is that the killer is now in Paris, with a new name and a new face. You seem to have failed once again, my dear commissaire.’

‘Let us save the recriminations for later,’ interposed the Minister. ‘How many Danes are there in Paris tonight?’

‘Probably several hundreds, Monsieur le Ministre.’

‘Can we check them?’

‘Only in the morning, when the hotel registration cards come in to the Prefecture,’ said Lebel.

‘I will arrange to have every hotel visited at midnight, two o’clock and four o’clock,’ proposed the Prefect of Police. ‘Under the heading of “profession” he will have to put “pastor” or the hotel clerk will be suspicious.’

The room brightened.

‘He will probably wrap a scarf round his dog collar, or take it off, and register as “mister” whatever-his-name-is,’ said Lebel. Several people glowered at him.

‘At this point, gentlemen, there is only one thing left to do,’ said the Minister. ‘I shall ask for another interview with the President and ask him to cancel all public appearances until this man is found and disposed of. In the meantime every Dane registering in Paris tonight will be checked personally first thing in the morning. I can rely on you for that, Commissaire? Monsieur le Préfet de Police?’

Lebel and Papon nodded.

‘Then that is all, gentlemen.’

‘The thing that sticks in my craw,’ said Lebel to Caron later in their office, ‘is that they insist on thinking it’s just his good luck and our stupidity. Well, he’s had good luck, but he’s also devilishly clever. And we’ve had bad luck, and we’ve made mistakes. I’ve made them. But there’s another element. Twice we’ve missed him by hours. Once he get’s out of Gap with a re-painted car in the nick of time. Now he leaves the château and kills his mistress into the bargain within hours of the Alfa Romeo being found. And each time it’s the morning after I have told that meeting at the Ministry that we have him in the bag, and his capture can be expected within twelve hours. Lucien, my dear fellow, I think I’m going to use my limitless powers and organise a little wire-tapping.’

He was leaning against the window-ledge, looking out across the softly flowing Seine towards the Latin Quarter where the lights were bright and the sound of laughter floated over the floodlit water.

Three hundred yards away another man leaned over his window sill in the summer night and gazed pensively at the bulk of the Police Judiciaire lying to the left of the spotlit spires of Notre Dame. He was clad in black trousers and walking shoes, with a polo-necked silk sweater covering a white shirt and black bib. He smoked a king-size English filter cigarette, and the young face belied the shock of iron-grey hair above it.

As the two men looked towards each other unknowing above the waters of the Seine, the varied chimes of the churches of Paris ushered in August 22nd.