As he vanished round a bend at the end of a stretch of straight, a small convoy came buzzing down from Egletons. It comprised a police squad car and two closed vans. The convoy stopped in the middle of the straight, and six policemen started to erect a steel road block.
‘What do you mean, he’s out?’ roared Valentin to the weeping wife of a taxi-driver in Egletons. ‘Where did he go?’
‘I don’t know, monsieur. I don’t know. He waits every morning at the station square when the morning train comes in from Ussel. If there are no passengers he comes back here to the garage and gets on with some repair work. If he does not come back it means he has picked up a fare.’
Valentin looked around gloomily. It was no use bawling out the woman. It was a one-man taxi business run by a fellow who also did a bit of repair work on cars.
‘Did he take anyone anywhere on Friday morning?’ he asked, more patiently.
‘Yes, monsieur. He had come back from the station because there was no one there, and a call from the café that somebody there wanted a taxi. He had got one of the wheels off, and was worried in case the customer should leave and go in another taxi. So he was cussing all through the twenty minutes it took to put the wheel back on. Then he left. He got the fare, but he never said where he took him.’ She snuffled. ‘He doesn’t talk to me much,’ she added by way of explanation.
Valentin patted her on the shoulder.
‘All right, madame. Don’t upset yourself. We’ll wait till he gets back.’ He turned to one of the sergeants. ‘Get a man to the main station, another to the square, to the café. You know the number of that taxi. The moment he shows up I want to see him—fast.’
He left the garage and strode to his car.
‘The commissariat,’ he said. He had transferred the headquarters of the search to Egletons police station, which had not seen activity like it in years.
In a ravine six miles outside Tulle the Jackal dumped the suitcase containing all his English clothes and the passport of Alexander Duggan. It had served him well. The case plummeted over the parapet of the bridge and vanished with a crash into the dense undergrowth at the foot of the gorge.
After circling Tulle and finding the station, he parked the car unobtrusively three streets away and carried his two suitcases and grip the half-mile to the railway booking office.
‘I would like a single ticket to Paris, second class please,’ he told the clerk. ‘How much is that?’ He peered over his glasses and through the little grille into the cubbyhole where the clerk worked.
‘Ninety-seven new francs, monsieur.’
‘And what time is the next train please?’
‘Eleven-fifty. You’ve got nearly an hour to wait. There’s a restaurant down the platform. Platform One for Paris, je vous en prie.’
The Jackal picked up his luggage and headed for the barrier. The ticket was clipped, he picked up the cases again and walked through. His path was barred by a blue uniform.
‘Vos papiers, s’il vous plaît.’
The CRS man was young, trying to look sterner than his years would allow. He carried a submachine carbine slung over his shoulder. The Jackal put down his luggage again and proffered his Danish passport. The CRS man flicked through it, not understanding a word.
‘Vous êtes Danois?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Vous … Danois.’ He tapped the cover of the passport.
The Jackal beamed and nodded in delight.
‘Danske … ja, ja.’
The CRS man handed the passport back and jerked his head towards the platform. Without further interest he stepped forward to bar passage to another traveller coming through the barrier.
It was not until nearly one o’clock that Louison came back, and he had had a glass of wine or two. His distraught wife poured out her tale of woe. Louison took the matter in hand.
‘I shall,’ he announced, ‘mount to the window and look in.’
He had trouble with the ladder to start with. It kept wanting to go its own way. But eventually it was propped against the brickwork beneath the window of the Baroness’s bedroom and Louison made his unsteady way to the top. He came down five minutes later.
‘Madame la Baronne is asleep,’ he announced.
‘But she never sleeps this late,’ protested Ernestine.
‘Well, she is doing today,’ replied Louison, ‘one must not disturb her.’
The Paris train was slightly late. It arrived at Tulle on the dot of one o’clock. Among the passengers who boarded it was a grey-haired Protestant pastor. He took a corner seat in a compartment inhabited only by two middle-aged women, put on a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses, took a large book on churches and cathedrals from his hand-grip, and started to read. The arrival time at Paris, he learned, was ten past eight that evening.
Charles Bobet stood on the roadside next to his immobilised taxi, looked at his watch and swore. Half past one, time for lunch, and here he was stuck on a lonely stretch of road between Egletons and the hamlet of Lamazière. With a busted half-shaft. Merde and merde again. He could leave the car and try to walk to the next village, take a bus into Egletons and return in the evening with a repair truck. That alone would cost him a week’s earnings. But then again the car doors had no locks, and his fortune was tied up in the rattletrap taxi. Better not leave it for those thieving village kids to ransack. Better to be a little patient and wait until a lorry came along that could (for a consideration) tow him back to Egletons. He had had no lunch, but there was a bottle of wine in the glove compartment. Well, it was almost empty now. Crawling around under taxis was thirsty work. He climbed into the back of the car to wait. It was extremely hot on the roadside, and no lorries would be moving until the day had cooled a little. The peasants would be taking their siesta. He made himself comfortable and fell fast asleep.
‘What do you mean he’s not back yet? Where’s the bugger gone?’ roared Commissaire Valentin down the telephone. He was sitting in the commissariat at Egletons, ringing the house of the taxi-driver and speaking to his own policeman. The babble of the voice on the other end was apologetic. Valentin slammed the phone down. All morning and through the lunch-hour radio reports had come in from the squad cars manning the road blocks. No one remotely resembling a tall blond Englishman had left the twenty-kilometre-radius circle round Egletons. Now the sleepy market town was silent in the summer heat, dozing blissfully as if the two hundred policemen from Ussel and Clermont Ferrand had never descended upon it.
It was not until four o’clock that Ernestine got her way.
‘You must go up there again and wake Madame,’ she urged Louison. ‘It’s not natural for anyone to sleep right through the day.’
Old Louison, who could think of nothing better than to be able to do just that, and whose mouth tasted like a vulture’s crotch, disagreed, but knew there was no use in arguing with Ernestine when her mind was made up. He ascended the ladder again, this time more steadily than before, eased up the window and stepped inside. Ernestine watched from below.
After a few minutes the old man’s head came out of the window.
‘Ernestine,’ he called hoarsely, ‘Madame seems to be dead.’
He was about to climb back down again when Ernestine screamed at him to open the bedroom door from the inside. Together they peered over the edge of the coverlet at the eyes staring blankly at the pillow a few inches away from the face.
Ernestine took over.
‘Louison.’
‘Yes, my dear.’
‘Hurry down to the village and fetch Dr Mathieu. Hurry now.’