The Day of the Jackal

  ‘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 f
urther 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 re
staurant 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.