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 mast
er 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.
The Day of the Jackal Page 33
