He screwed the new number plates on, threw away what remained of the paint and the two brushes, pulled back on his polo-necked silk sweater and jacket, and gunned the engine into life. As he swept back on to the RN93 he checked his watch. It was 3.41 in the afternoon.
High overhead he watched a helicopter clattering on its way towards the east. It was seven miles further to the village of Die. He knew well enough not to pronounce it in the English way, but the coincidence of the name occurred to him. He was not superstitious, but his eyes narrowed as he drove into the centre of the town. At the main square near the war memorial a huge black-leather-coated motor-cycle policeman was standing in the middle of the road waving him to stop and pull in to the extreme right-hand side of the road. His gun, he knew, was still in its tubes wired to the chassis of the car. He carried no automatic or knife. For a second he hesitated, unsure whether to hit the policeman a glancing blow with the wing of the car and keep driving, later to abandon the car a dozen miles further on and try without a mirror or a washbasin to transform himself into Pastor Jensen, with four pieces of luggage to cope with, or whether to stop.
It was the policeman who made the decision for him. Ignoring him completely as the Alfa began to slow down, the policeman turned round and scanned the road in the other direction. The Jackal slid the car into the side of the road, watched and waited.
From the far side of the village he heard the wailing of sirens. Whatever happened, it was too late to get out now. Into the village came a convoy of four Citroën police cars and six Black Marias. As the traffic cop jumped to one side and swept his arm up in salute, the convoy raced past the parked Alfa and headed down the road from which he had come. Through the wired windows of the vans, which give them the French nickname of salad-baskets, he could see the rows of helmeted police, submachine guns across their knees.
Almost as soon as it had come, the convoy was gone. The speed cop brought his arm down from the salute, gave the Jackal an indolent gesture that he could now proceed, and stalked off to his motor-cycle parked against the war memorial. He was still kicking the starter when the blue Alfa disappeared round the corner heading west.
It was 4.50 pm when they hit the Hôtel du Cerf. Claude Lebel, who had landed a mile on the other side of the township and been driven to the driveway of the hotel in a police car, walked up to the front door accompanied by Caron who carried a loaded and cocked MAT 49 submachine carbine under the mackintosh slung over his right arm. The forefinger was on the trigger. Everyone in the town knew there was something afoot by this time, except the proprietor of the hotel. It had been isolated for five hours, and the only odd thing had been the non-arrival of the trout-seller with his day’s catch of fresh fish.
Summoned by the desk clerk, the proprietor appeared from his labours over the accounts in the office. Lebel listened to him answer Caron’s questions, glancing nervously at the odd-shaped bundle under Caron’s arm, and his shoulders sagged.
Five minutes later the hotel was deluged with uniformed police. They interviewed the staff, examined the bedroom, chased through the grounds. Lebel walked alone out into the drive and stared up at the surrounding hills. Caron joined him.
‘You think he’s really gone, chief?’ Lebel nodded.
‘He’s gone all right.’
‘But he was booked in for two days. Do you think the proprietor’s in this with him?’
‘No. He and the staff aren’t lying. He changed his mind some time this morning. And he left. The question now is where the hell has he gone, and does he suspect yet that we know who he is?’
‘But how could he? He couldn’t know that. It must be coincidence. It must be.’
‘My dear Lucien, let us hope so.’
‘All we’ve got to go on now, then, is the car number.’
‘Yes. That was my mistake. We should have put the alert out for the car. Get on to the police R/T to Lyons from one of the squad cars and make it an all-stations alert. Top priority. White Alfa Romeo, Italian, Number MI-61741. Approach with caution, occupant believed armed and dangerous. You know the drill. But one more thing, nobody is to mention it to the Press. Include in the message the instruction that the suspected man probably does not know he’s suspected, and I’ll skin anybody who lets him hear it on the radio or read it in the Press. I’m going to tell Commissaire Gaillard of Lyons to take over here. Then let’s get back to Paris.’
It was nearly six o’clock when the blue Alfa coasted into the town of Valence where the steel torrent of the Route Nationale Seven, the main road from Lyons to Marseilles and the highway carrying most of the traffic from Paris to the Côte d’Azur, thunders along the banks of the Rhône. The Alfa crossed the great road running south and took the bridge over the river towards the RN533 to St Péray on the western bank. Below the bridge the mighty river smouldered in the afternoon sunlight, ignored the puny steel insects scurrying southwards and rolled at its own leisurely but certain pace towards the waiting Mediterranean.
After St Péray, as dusk settled on the valley behind him, the Jackal gunned the little sports car higher and higher into the mountains of the Massif Central and the province of Auvergne. After Le Puy the going got steeper, the mountains higher and every town seemed to be a watering spa where the life-giving streams flowing out from the rocks of the massif had attracted those with aches and eczemas developed in the cities and made fortunes for the cunning Auvergnat peasants who had gone into the spa business with a will.
After Brioude the valley of the Allier river dropped behind, and the smell in the night air was of heather and drying hay in the upland pastures. He stopped to fill the tank at Issoire, then sped on through the casino town of Mont Doré and the spa of La Bourdoule. It was nearly midnight when he rounded the headwaters of the Dordogne, where it rises among the Auvergne rocks to flow south and west through half a dozen dams and spend itself into the Atlantic at Bordeaux.
From La Bourdoule he took the RN89 towards Ussel, the county town of Corrèze.
‘You are a fool, Monsieur le Commissaire, a fool. You had him within your grasp, and you let him slip.’ Saint-Clair had half-risen to his feet to make his point, and glared down the polished mahogany table at the top of Lebel’s head. The detective was studying the papers of his dossier, for all the world as if Saint-Clair did not exist.
He had decided that was the only way to treat the arrogant colonel from the Palace, and Saint-Clair for his part was not quite sure whether the bent head indicated an appropriate sense of shame or an insolent indifference. He preferred to believe it was the former. When he had finished and sank back into his seat, Claude Lebel looked up.
‘If you will look at the mimeographed report in front of you, my dear Colonel, you will observe that we did not have him in our hands,’ he observed mildly. ‘The report from Lyons that a man in the name of Duggan had registered the previous evening at a hotel in Gap did not reach the PJ until 12.15 today. We now know that the Jackal left the hotel abruptly at 11.05. Whatever measures had been taken, he still had an hour’s start.
‘Moreover, I cannot accept your strictures on the efficiency of the police forces of this country in general. I would remind you that the orders of the President are that this affair will be managed in secret. It was therefore not possible to put out an alert to every rural gendarmerie for a man named Duggan for it would have started a hullabaloo in the Press. The card registering Duggan at the Hôtel du Cerf was collected in the normal way at the normal time, and sent with due dispatch to Regional Headquarters at Lyons. Only there was it realised that Duggan was a wanted man. This delay was unavoidable, unless we wish to launch a nationwide hue-and-cry for the man, and that is outside my brief.