The Day of the Jackal

Lebel stared at the slowly turning tape spool.

‘You know the number she rang?’ Lebel asked the engineer.

‘Yup. We can work it out from the length of the delay while the dialing disc spins back to zero. The number was MOLITOR 5901.’

‘You have the address?’

The man passed him a slip of paper. Lebel glanced at it.

‘Come on, Lucien. Let’s go a

nd pay a call on Monsieur Valmy.’

‘What about the girl?’

‘Oh, she’ll have to be charged.’

The knock came at seven o’clock. The schoolmaster was brewing himself a cup of breakfast food on the gas-ring. With a frown he turned down the gas and crossed the sitting room to open the door. Four men were facing him. He knew who they were and what they were without being told. The two in uniform looked as if they were going to lunge at him, but the short, mild-looking man gestured for them to remain where they were.

‘We tapped the phone,’ said the little man quietly. ‘You’re Valmy.’

The schoolmaster gave no sign of emotion. He stepped back and let them enter the room.

‘May I get dressed?’ he asked.

‘Yes, of course.’

It took him only a few minutes, as the two uniformed policemen stood over him, to draw on trousers and shirt, without bothering to remove his pyjamas. The younger man in plain clothes stood in the doorway. The older man wandered round the flat, inspecting the piles of books and papers.

‘It’ll take ages to sort through this little lot, Lucien,’ he said, and the man in the doorway grunted.

‘Not our department, thank God.’

‘Are you ready?’ the little man asked the schoolmaster.

‘Yes.’

‘Take him downstairs to the car.’

The Commissaire remained when the other four had left, riffling through the papers on which the schoolmaster had apparently been working the night before. But they were all ordinary school examination papers being corrected. Apparently the man worked from his flat; he would have to stay in the flat all day to remain on the end of the telephone in case the Jackal called. It was ten past seven when the telephone rang. Lebel watched it for several seconds. Then his hand reached out and picked it up.

‘Allo?’

The voice on the other end was flat, toneless.

‘Ici Chacal.’

Lebel thought furiously.

‘Ici Valmy,’ he said. There was a pause. He did not know what else to say.

‘What’s new?’ asked the voice at the other end.

‘Nothing. They’ve lost the trail in Corrèze.’

There was a film of sweat on his forehead. It was vital the man stay where he was for a few hours more. There was a click and the phone went dead. Lebel replaced it and raced downstairs to the car at the kerbside.

‘Back to the office,’ he yelled at the driver.