The Day of the Jackal

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.

‘Tell him,’ said Lebel when he had digested the information, ‘that we will handle the Belgians from here. Say that he has my very sincere thanks for his help, and that if the killer can be traced to a location on the Continent rather than in Britain, I will inform him immediately so that he can stand his men down.’

When the receiver was down both men settled back at their desks. ‘Get me the Sûreté in Brussels,’ said Lebel.

The Jackal rose when the sun was already high over the hills and gave promise of another beautiful summer day. He showered and dressed, taking his check suit, well pressed, from the hands of the maid, Marie-Louise, who blushed again when he thanked her.

Shortly after ten-thirty he drove the Alfa into town and went to the post office to use the long-distance telephone to Paris. When he emerged twenty minutes later he was tight-lipped and in a hurry. At a hardware store nearby he bought a quart of high-gloss lacquer in midnight blue, a half-pint tin in white, and two brushes, one a fine-tipped camel-hair for lettering, the other a two-inch soft bristle. He also bought a screwdriver. With these in the glove compartment of the car he drove back to the Hôtel du Cerf and asked for his bill.

While it was being prepared he went upstairs to pack, and carried the suitcases down to the car himself. When the three cases were in the boot and the hand-grip on the passenger seat, he re-entered the foyer and settled the bill. The day clerk who had taken over the reception desk would say later that he seemed hurried and nervous, and paid the bill with a new hundred-franc note.