Thomas lifted the telephone on his desk and asked for a number …
The two men met for a drink in a quiet pub down by the river between eight and nine. They talked rugby for a while, as Thomas bought the drinks. But Lloyd guessed the man from Special Branch had not asked to see him at a riverside pub to talk about a game for which the season would not start for another two months. When they had both got their drinks, and given each other a perfunctory ‘Cheers’, Thomas gestured with his head outside on to the terrace that led down to the wharf. It was quieter outside, for most of the young couples from Chelsea and Fulham were drinking up and heading off for dinner.
‘Got a bit of a problem, boyo,’ began Thomas. ‘Hoped you might be able to help.’
‘Well … if I can,’ said Lloyd.
Thomas explained about the request from Paris, and the blank drawn by Criminal Records and the Special Branch.
‘It occurred to me that if there ever was such a man, and a British one at that, he might be the kind who would never get his hands dirty inside this country, see. Might just stick to operations abroad. If he ever had left a trail, maybe he came to the attention of the Service?’
‘Service?’ asked Lloyd quietly.
‘Come on, Barrie. We have to know a lot of things, from time to time.’ Thomas’s voice was hardly above a murmur. From the back they looked like two men in dark suits staring out over the dusky river at the lights of the south bank, talking of the day’s dealings in the City. ‘We had to turn over a lot of files during the Blake investigations. A lot of Foreign Office people got a peek taken at what they were really up to. Yours was one, see. You were in his section at the time he came under suss. So I know what department you work with.’
‘I see,’ said Lloyd.
‘Now look, I may be Bryn Thomas down at the Park. But I’m also a superintendent of the SB, right? You can’t all be anonymous from everyone, now can you?’
Lloyd stared into his glass.
‘Is this an official enquiry for information?’
‘No, I can’t make it that yet. The French request was an unofficial request from Lebel to Mallinson. He could find nothing in Central Records, so he replied that he couldn’t help, but he also had a word with Dixon. Who asked me to have a quick check. All on the quiet, see? Sometimes things have to be done that way. Very delicate, all this. Mustn’t get out to the Press or anything. Chances are there’s nothing here in Britain at all that might help Lebel. I just thought I’d cover all the angles, and you were the last.’
‘This man is supposed to be after De Gaulle?’
‘Must be, by the sound of the enquiry. But the French must be playing it very cagey. They obviously don’t want any publicity.’
‘Obviously. But why not contact us direct?’
‘The request for suggestions as to a name has been put through on the old boy network. From Lebel to Mallinson, direct. Perhaps the French Secret Service doesn’t have an old boy network with your section.’
If Lloyd had noticed the reference to the notoriously bad relations between the SDECE and the SIS, he gave no sign of it.
‘What are you thinking?’ asked Thomas after a while.
‘Funny,’ said Lloyd staring out over the river. ‘You remember the Philby case?’
‘Of course.’
‘Still a very sore nerve in our section,’ resumed Lloyd. ‘He went over from Beirut in January ’61. Of course, it didn’t get out until later, but it caused a hell of a rumpus inside the Service. A lot of people got moved around. Had to be done, he had blown most of the Arab Section and some others as well. One of the men who had to be moved very fast was our top resident in the Caribbean. He had been with Philby in Beirut six months before, then transferred to Carib.
‘About the same time the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, was assassinated on a lonely road outside Ciudad Trujillo. According to the reports he was killed by partisans—he had a lot of enemies. Our man came back to London then, and we shared an office for a while until he was re-deployed. He mentioned a rumour that Trujillo’s car was stopped, for the ambushers to blow it open and kill the man inside, by a single shot from a marksman with a rifle. It was a hell of a shot—from one hundred and fifty yards at a speeding car. Went through the little triangular window on the driver’s side, the one that wasn’t of bullet-proof glass. The whole car was armoured. Hit the driver through the throat and he crashed. That was when the partisans closed in. The odd thing was, rumour had it the shooter was an Englishman.’
There was a long pause as the two men, the empty beer mugs swinging from their fingers, stared across the now quite darkened waters of the Thames. Both had a mental picture of a harsh, arid landscape in a hot and distant island; of a car careering at seventy miles an hour off a bitumen strip and into the rocky verge; of an old man in fawn twill and gold braid, who had ruled his kingdom with an iron and ruthless hand for thirty years, being dragged from the wreck to be finished off with pistols in the dust by the roadside.
‘This … man … in the rumour. Did he have a name?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. It was just talk in the office at the time. We had an awful lot on our plate then, and a Caribbean dictator was the last thing we needed to worry about.’
‘This colleague, the one who talked to you. Did he write a report?’
‘Must have done. Standard practice. But it was just a rumour, understand. Just a rumour. Nothing to go on. We deal in facts, solid information.’
‘But it must have been filed, somewhere?’
‘Suppose so,’ said Lloyd. ‘Very low priority, only a bar rumour in that area. Place abounds in rumours.’
‘But you could just have a look back at the files, like? See if the man on the mountain had a name?’
Lloyd pulled himself off the rail.
‘You get on home,’ he said to the Superintendent. ‘I’ll ring you if there’s anything that might help.’
They walked back into the rear bar of the pub, deposited the glasses, and made for the street door.
‘I’d be grateful,’ said Thomas as they shook hands. ‘Probably nothing in it. But just on the off-chance.’
While Thomas and Lloyd were talking above the waters of the Thames, and the Jackal was scooping the last drops of his Zabaglione from the glass in a roof-top restaurant in Milan, Commissaire Claude Lebel attended the first of the progress report meetings in the conference room of the Interior Ministry in Paris.
The attendance was the same as it had been twenty-four hours earlier. The Interior Minister sat at the head of the table, with the department heads down each side. Claude Lebel sat at the other end with a small folder in front of him. The Minister nodded curtly for the meeting to begin.
His chef de cabinet spoke first. Over the previous day and night, he said, every Customs officer on every border post in France had received instructions to check through the luggage of tall blond male foreigners entering France. Passports particularly were to be checked, and were to be scrutinised by the DST official at the Customs post for possible forgeries. (The head of the DST inclined his head in acknowledgement.) Tourists and business men entering France might well remark a sudden increase in vigilance at Customs, but it was felt unlikely that any victim of such a baggage search would realise it was being applied across the country to tall blond men. If any enquiries were made by a sharp-eyed Press man, the explanation would be that they were nothing but routine snap searches. But it was felt no enquiry would ever be made.