‘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.