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 hamle
t 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.
The Day of the Jackal Page 34