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.
Colette lay on her back and gazed up at the ceiling, the fingers of one hand running idly through the blond hair of the head pillowed on her belly. Her lips parted in a half-smile as she thought back over the night.
He had been good, this English primitive, hard but skilled, knowing how to use fingers and tongue and prick to bring her on five times and himself three. She could still feel the blazing heat going into her when he came, and she knew how badly she had needed a night like this for so long when she responded as she had not for years.
She glanced at the small travelling clock beside the bed. It said a quarter past five. She tightened her grip in the blond hair and pulled.
‘Hey.’
The Englishman muttered, half asleep. They were both lying naked among the disordered sheets, but the central heating kept the room comfortably warm. The blond head disengaged itself from her hand and slid between her thighs. She could feel the tickle of the hot breath and the tongue flickering in search again.
‘No, no more.’
She closed her thighs quickly, sat up and grabbed the hair, raising his face until she could look at him. He eased himself up the bed, plunged his face on to one of her full heavy breasts and started to kiss.
‘I said no.’
He looked up at her.
‘That’s enough, lover. I have to get up in two hours, and you have to go back to your room. Now, my little English, now.’
He got the message and nodded, swinging off the bed to stand on the floor, looking round for his clothes. She slid under the bedclothes, sorted them out from the mess around her knees and pulled them up to the chin. When he was dressed, with jacket and tie slung over one arm, he looked down at her in the half-darkness and she saw the gleam of teeth as he grinned. He sat on the edge of the bed and ran his right hand round to the back of her neck. His face was a few inches from hers.
‘It was good?’
‘Mmmmmm. It was very good. And you?’
He grinned again. ‘What do you think?’
She laughed. ‘What is your name?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Alex,’ he lied.
‘Well, Alex it was very good. But it is also time you went back to your own room.’
He bent down and gave her a kiss on the lips.
‘In that case, good night, Colette.’
A second later he was gone, and the door closed behind him.
At seven in the morning, as the sun was rising, a local gendarme cycled up to the Hotel du Cerf, dismounted and entered the lobby. The proprietor who was already up and busy behind the reception desk organising the morning calls and café complet for the guests in their rooms, greeted him.
‘Alors, bright and early?’
‘As usual,’ said the gendarme. ‘It’s a long ride out here on a bicycle, and I always leave you till the last.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ grinned the proprietor, ‘we do the best breakfast coffee in the neighbourhood. Marie-Louise, bring Monsieur a cup of coffee, and no doubt he’ll take it laced with a little Trou Normand.’
The country constable grinned with pleasure.
‘Here are the cards,’ said the proprietor, handing over the little white cards filled in the previous evening by the newly arrived guests. ‘There were only three new ones last night.’
The constable took the cards and put them in the leather pouch on his belt.
‘Hardly worth turning up for,’ he grinned, but sat on the foyer bench and waited for his coffee and calvados, exchanging a few words of lustful banter with Marie-Louise when she brought it.
It was not until eight that he got back to the gendarmerie and commissariat of Gap with his pouchful of hotel registration cards. These were then taken by the station inspector who flicked through them idly and put them in the rack, to be taken later in the day to the regional headquarters at Lyons, and later to the archives of Central Records in Paris. Not that he could see the point of it all.
As the inspector was dropping the cards into the rack in the commissariat, Madame Colette de la Chalonnière settled her bill, climbed behind the wheel of her car and drove off towards the west. One floor above, the Jackal slept on until nine o’clock.
Superintendent Thomas had dozed off when the phone beside him gave a shrill buzz. It was the intercom phone linking his office with the room down the corridor where the six sergeants and two inspectors had been working on a battery of telephones since his briefing had ended.
He glanced at his watch. Ten o’clock. Damn, not like me to drop off. Then he remembered how many hours’ sleep he had had, or rather had not had, since Dixon had summoned him on Monday afternoon. And now it was Thursday morning. The phone buzzed again.
‘Hallo.’
The voice of the senior detective inspector answered.
‘Friend Duggan,’ he began without preliminary. ‘He left London on a scheduled BEA flight on Monday morning. The booking was taken on Saturday. No doubt about the name. Alexander Duggan. Paid cash at the airport for the ticket.’
‘Where to? Paris?’
‘No, Super. Brussels.’
Thomas’s head cleared quickly.
‘All right, listen. He may have gone but come back. Keep checking airline bookings to see if there have been any other bookings in his name. Particularly if there is a booking for a flight that has not yet left London. Check with advance bookings. If he came back from Brussels, I want to know. But I doubt it. I think we’ve lost him, although of course he left London several hours before investigations were started, so it’s not our fault. OK?’
‘Right. What about the search in the UK for the real Calthrop? It’s tying up a lot of the provincial police, and the Yard’s just been on to say that they’re complaining.’
Thomas thought for a moment.
‘Call it off,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty certain he’s gone.’
He picked up the outside phone and asked for the office of Commissaire Lebel at the Police Judiciaire.
Inspector Caron thought he was going to end up in a lunatic asylum before Thursday morning was out. First the British were on the phone at five past ten. He took the call himself, but when Superintendent Thomas insisted on speaking to Lebel he went over to the corner to rouse the sleeping form on the camp-bed. Lebel looked as if he had died a week before. But he took the call. As soon as he had identified himself to Thomas, Caron had to take the receiver back because of the language barrier. He translated what Thomas had to say, and Lebel’s replies.