The Day of the Jackal
Page 41
He’s trying to fix me rigid, thought Lebel with a sense of unrealism. He’s going to shoot. He’s going to kill me.
With an effort he dropped his eyes to the floor. The boy from the CRS had fallen sideways: his carbine had slipped from his fingers and lay at Lebel’s feet. Without conscious thought he dropped to his knees, grabbed the MAT 49, swinging it upwards with one hand, the other clawing for the trigger. He heard the Jackal snap home the breech of the rifle as he found the trigger of the carbine. He pulled it.
The roar of the exploding ammunition filled the small room and was heard in the square. Later press enquiries were met with the explanation that it had been a motor-cycle with a faulty silencer which some ass had kicked into life a few streets away at the height of the ceremony. Half a magazine full of nine-millimetre bullets hit the Jackal in the chest, picked him up, half-turned him in the air and slammed his body into an untidy heap in the far corner near the sofa. As he fell, he brought the standard lamp with him. Down below, the band struck up ‘Mon Régiment et Ma Patrie’.
Superintendent Thomas had a phone call at six that evening from Paris. He sent for the senior inspector of his staff.
‘They got him,’ he said. ‘In Paris. No problems, but you’d better get up to his flat and sort things out.’
It was eight o’clock when the inspector was having a last sort-through of Calthrop’s belongings that he heard someone come into the open doorway. He turned. A man was standing there scowling at him. A big-built, burly man.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked the inspector.
‘I might ask you just the same thing. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘All right, that’s enough,’ said the inspector. ‘Let’s have your name.’
‘Calthrop,’ said the newcomer, ‘Charles Calthrop. And this is my flat. Now what the hell are you doing to it?’
The inspector wished he carried a gun.
‘All right,’ he said quietly, warily. ‘I think you’d better come down to the Yard for a little chat.’
‘Too bloody right,’ said Calthrop. ‘You’ve got a bit of explaining to do.’
But in fact it was Calthrop who did the explaining. They held him for twenty-four hours, until three separate confirmations came through from Paris that the Jackal was dead, and five landlords of isolated taverns in the far north of Sutherland County, Scotland, had testified that Charles Calthrop had indeed spent the previous three weeks indulging his passion for climbing and fishing, and had stayed at their establishments.
‘If the Jackal wasn’t Calthrop,’ asked Thomas of his inspector when Calthrop finally walked out of the door a free man, ‘then who the hell was he?’
‘There can be no question, of course,’ said the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police the next day to Assistant Commissioner Dixon and Superintendent Thomas, ‘of Her Majesty’s Government ever conceding that this Jackal fellow was an Englishman at all. So far as one can see there was a period when a certain Englishman came under suspicion. He has now been cleared. We also know that for a period of his … er … assignment in France, the Jackal feller masqueraded as an Englishman under a falsely issued English passport. But he also masqueraded as a Dane, an American and a Frenchman, under two stolen passports and one set of forged French papers. As far as we are concerned, our enquiries established that the assassin was travelling in France under a false passport in the name of Duggan, and in this name he was traced to … er … this place Gap. That’s all. Gentlemen, the case is closed.’
The following day the body of a man was buried in an unmarked grave at a suburban cemetery in Paris. The death certificate showed the body to be that of an unnamed foreign tourist, killed on Sunday August 25th, 1963, in a hit-and-run accident on the motorway outside the city. Present was a priest, a policeman, a registrar and two grave-diggers. Nobody present showed any interest as the plain deal coffin was lowered into the grave, except the single other person who attended. When it was all over he turned round, declined to give his name, and walked back down the cemetery path, a solitary little figure, to return home to his wife and children.
The day of the Jackal was over.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781407095998
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Hutchinson 2011
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Frederick Forsyth 1971
Frederick Forsyth has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 1971 by
Hutchinson
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
www.rbooks.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780091937386