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 S
omerset 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.
The Day of the Jackal Page 31
