There was a clatter of an old van drawing up in the courtyard. Idly she drew the peignoir together and walked to the window that gave on to the front of the house. A van from the village was parked there, the rear doors open. Two men were at the back taking something down from the tailboard. Louison was walking across from where he had been weeding one of the ornamental lawns to help carry the load.
One of the men hidden behind the van walked round to the front, stuffing some paper into his trouser pocket, climbed into the driving seat and engaged the grinding clutch. Who was delivering things to the château? She had not ordered anything. The van started to pull away and she gave a start of surprise. There were three suitcases and a hand-grip on the gravel, beside them was a man. She recognised the gleam of the blond hair in the sun and smiled wide with pleasure.
‘You animal. You beautiful primitive animal. You followed me.’
She hurried into the bathroom to dress.
When she came on to the landing she caught the sound of voices in the hall below. Ernestine was asking what Monsieur wanted.
‘Madame la Baronne, elle est là?’
In a moment Ernestine came hurrying up the stairs as fast as her old legs would carry her. ‘A gentleman has called, ma’am.’
The evening meeting in the Ministry that Friday was shorter than usual. The only thing to report was that there was nothing. For the past twenty-four hours the description of the wanted car had been circulated in a routine manner, so as not to arouse undue suspicion, throughout France. It had not been spotted. Similarly every Regional Headquarters of the Police Judiciaire had ordered its dependent local commissariats in town and country to get all hotel registration cards into HQ by eight in the morning at the latest. At the Regional HQs they were immediately scoured, tens of thousands of them, for the name of Duggan. Nothing had been spotted. Therefore, he had not stayed last night in a hotel, at least, not in the name of Duggan.
‘We have to accept one of two premises,’ explained Lebel to a silent gathering. ‘Either he still believes he is unsuspected, in other words his departure from the Hôtel du Cerf was an unpremeditated action and a coincidence; in which case there is no reason for him not to use his Alfa Romeo openly and stay openly in hotels under the name of Duggan. In that case he must be spotted sooner or later. In the second case he has decided to ditch the car somewhere and abandon it, and rely on his own resources. In the latter case, there are a further two possibilities.
‘Either he has no further false identities on which to rely; in which case he cannot get far without registering at a hotel or trying to pass a frontier point on his way out of France. Or he has another identity and has passed into it. In the latter case he is still extremely dangerous.’
‘What makes you think he might have another identity?’ asked Colonel Rolland.
‘We have to assume,’ said Lebel, ‘that this man, having been offered evidently a very large sum by the OAS to carry out this assassination, must be one of the best professional killers in the world. That implies that he has had experience. And yet he has managed to stay clear of any official suspicion, and all official police dossiers. The only way he could do this would be by carrying out his assignments in a false name and with a false appearance. In other words, an expert in disguise as well.
‘We know from the comparison of the two photographs that Calthrop was able to extend his height by high-heeled shoes, slim off several kilos in weight, change his eye colour by contact lenses and his hair colour with dye to become Duggan. If he can do that once, we cannot afford the luxury of assuming he cannot do it again.’
‘But there’s no reason to suppose he suspected he would be exposed before he got close to the President,’ protested Saint-Clair. ‘Why should he take such elaborate precautions as to have one or more false identities?’
‘Because,’ said Lebel, ‘he apparently does take elaborate precautions. If he did not, we should have had him by now.’
‘I note from Calthrop’s dossier, as passed on by the British police, that he did his National Service just after the war in the parachute regiment. Perhaps he’s using this experience to live rough, hiding out in the hills,’ suggested Max Fernet.
‘Perhaps,’ agreed Lebel.
‘In that case he is more or less finished as a potential danger.’
Lebel considered for a moment.
‘Of this particular person, I would not like to say that until he is behind bars.’
‘Or dead,’ said Rolland.
‘If he’s got any sense, he’ll be trying to get out of France while he’s still alive,’ said Saint-Clair.
On that note the meeting broke up.
‘I wish I could count on that,’ Lebel told Caron back in the office. ‘But as far as I’m concerned he’s alive, well, free and armed. We keep on looking for him and that car. He had three pieces of luggage, he can’t have got far on foot with all that. Find that car and we start from there.’
The man they wanted was lying on fresh linen in a château in the heart of Corrèze. He was bathed and relaxed, filled with a meal of country pâté and jugged hare, washed down with rough red wine, black coffee and brandy. He stared up at the gilt curlicues that writhed across the ceiling and planned the course of the days that now separated him from his assignment in Paris. In a week, he thought, he would have to move, and getting away might prove difficult. But it could be done. He would have to think out a reason for going.
The door opened and the Baroness came in. Her hair had been let down around her shoulders and she wore a peignoir held together at the throat but open down the front. As she moved it swayed briefly open. She was quite naked beneath it, but had kept on the stockings she had worn at dinner and the high-heeled court shoes. The Jackal propped himself up on one elbow as she closed the door and walked over to the bed.
She looked down at him in silence. He reached up and slipped loose the bow of ribbon that held the nightdress closed at the throat. It swung open to reveal the breasts, and as he craned forward his hand slid the lace-edged material off her shoulders. It slid down to the floor without a sound.
She pushed his shoulder so that he rolled back on to the bed, then gripped his wrists and pinned them against the pillow as she climbed over him. He stared back up at her as she knelt above him, her thighs gripping his ribs hard. She smiled down at him, two curling strands of hair falling down to the nipples.
‘Bon, my primitif, now let’s see you perform.’
He eased his head forward as her bottom rose off his chest, and started.
For three days the trail went cold for Lebel, and at each evening meeting the volume of opinion that the Jackal had left France secretly with his tail between his legs increased. By the meeting on the evening of the 19th he was alone in maintaining his view that the killer was still somewhere in France, lying low and biding his time, waiting.
‘Waiting for what?’ shrilled Saint-Clair that evening. ‘The only thing he can be waiting for, if he is still here, is an opportunity to make a dash for the border. The moment he breaks cover we have got him. He has every man’s arm against him, nowhere to go, no one to take him in, if your supposition that he is completely cut off from the OAS and their sympathisers is correct.’
There was a murmur of assent from the table, most of whose members were beginning to harden in their opinion that the police had failed, and that Bouvier’s original dictum that the location of the killer was a purely detective task had been wrong.