‘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.
In the telephone booth in the foyer of a small hotel by the banks of the Seine the Jackal stared out through the glass perplexed. Nothing? There must be more than nothing. This Commissaire Lebel was no fool. They must have traced the taxi-driver in Egletons, and from there to Haute Chalonnière. They must have found the body in the château, and the missing Renault. They must have found the Renault in Tulle, and questioned the staff at the station. They must have …
He strode out of the telephone booth and across the foyer.
‘My bill, if you please,’ he told the clerk. ‘I shall be down in five minutes.’
The call from Superintendent Thomas came in as Lebel entered his office at seven-thirty.
‘Sorry to have been so long,’ said the British detective. ‘It took ages to wake the Danish consular staff and get them back to the office. You were quite right. On July 14th a Danish parson reported the loss of his passport. He suspected it had been stolen from his room at a West End hotel, but could not prove it. Did not file a complaint, to the relief of the hotel manager. Name of Pastor Per Jensen, of Copenhagen. Description, six feet tall, blue eyes, grey hair.’
‘That’s the one, thank you, Superintendent.’ Lebel put the phone down. ‘Get me the Prefecture,’ he told Caron.
The four Black Marias arrived outside the hotel on the Quai des Grands Augustins at 8.30. The police turned room 37 over until it looked as if a tornado had hit it.
‘I’m sorry, Monsieur le Commissaire,’ the proprietor told the rumpled-looking detective who led the raid, ‘Pastor Jensen checked out an hour ago.’
The Jackal had taken a cruising taxi back towards the Gare d’Austerlitz where he had arrived the previous evening, on the grounds that the search for him would have moved elsewhere. He deposited the suitcase containing the gun and the military greatcoat and clothes of the fictitious Frenchman André Martin in the left-luggage office, and retained only the suitcase in which he carried the clothes and papers of American student Marty Schulberg, and the hand-grip with the articles of makeup.
With these, still dressed in the black suit but with a polo sweater covering the dog-collar, he checked into a poky hotel round the corner from the station. The clerk let him fill in his own registration card, being too idle to check the card against the passport of the visitor as regulations required. As a result the registration card was not even in the name of Per Jensen.
Once up in his room, the Jackal set to work on his face and hair. The grey dye was washed out with the aid of a solvent, and the blond reappeared. This was tinted with the chestnut-brown colouring of Marty Schulberg. The blue contact lenses remained in place, but the gold-rimmed glasses were replaced by the American’s heavy-rimmed executive spectacles. The black walking shoes, socks, shirt, bib and clerical suit were bundled into the suitcase, along with the passport of Pastor Jensen of Copenhagen. He dressed instead in the sneakers, socks, jeans, T-shirt and windcheater of the American college boy from Syracuse, New York State.
By mid-morning, with the American’s passport in one breast pocket and a wad of French francs in the other, he was ready to move. The suitcase containing the last remains of Pastor Jensen went into the wardrobe, and the key of the wardrobe went down the flush of the bidet. He used the fire-escape to depart, and was no more heard of in that hotel. A few minutes later he deposited the hand-grip in the left-luggage office at the Gare d’Austerlitz, stuffed the docket for the second case into his back pocket to join the docket of the first suitcase, and went on his way. He took a taxi back to the Left Bank, got out at the corner of Boulevard Saint Michel and the Rue de la Huchette, and vanished into the maelstrom of students and young people who inhabit the rabbit warren of the Latin Quarter of Paris.
Sitting at the back of a smoky dive for a cheap lunch, he started to wonder where he was going to spend the night. He had few doubts that Lebel would have exposed Pastor Per Jensen by this time, and he gave Marty Schulberg no more than twenty-four hours.
‘Damn that man Lebel,’ he thought savagely, but smiled broadly at the waitress and said, ‘Thanks, honey.’
Lebel was back on to Thomas in London at ten o’clock. His request caused Thomas to give a low groan, but he replied courteously enough that he would do everything he could. When the phone went down Thomas summoned the senior inspector who had been on the investigation the previous week. ‘All right, sit down,’ he said. ‘The Frenchies have been back on. It seems they’ve missed him again. Now he’s in the centre of Paris, and they suspect he might have another false identity prepared. We can both start as of now ringing round every consulate in London asking for a list of passports of visiting foreigners reported lost or stolen since July 1st. Forget Negroes and Asiatics. Just stick to Caucasians. In each case I want to know the height of the man. Everybody above five feet eight inches is suspect. Get to work.’
The daily meeting at the Ministry in Paris had been brought forward to two in the afternoon.
Lebel’s report was delivered in his usual inoffensive monotone, but the reception was icy.
‘Damn the man,’ exclaimed the Minister halfway through, ‘he has the luck of the devil!’
‘No, Monsieur le Ministre, it hasn’t been luck. At least, not all of it. He has been kept constantly informed of our progress at every stage. This is why he left Gap in such a hurry, and why he killed the woman at La Chalonnière and left just before the net closed. Every night I have reported my progress to this meeting. Three times we have been within hours of catching him. This morning it was the arrest of Valmy and my inability to impersonate Valmy on the telephone that caused him to leave where he was and change into another identity. But the first two occasions he was tipped off in the early morning after I had briefed this meeting.’
There was a frigid silence round the table.
‘I seem to recall, Commissaire, that this suggestion of yours has been made before,’ said the Minister coldly. ‘I hope you can substantiate it.’
For answer Lebel lifted a small portable tape-recorder on to the table and pressed the starter button. In the silence of the conference room the conversation tapped from the telephone sounded metallic and harsh. When it finished the whole room stared at the machine on the table. Colonel Saint-Clair had gone ashen grey and his hands trembled slightly as he shuffled his papers together into his folder.
‘Whose voice was that?’ asked the Minister finally.
Lebel remained silent. Saint-Clair rose slowly, and the eyes of the room swivelled on to him.
‘I regret to have to inform you … M. le Ministre … that it was the voice of … a friend of mine. She is staying with me at the present time … Excuse me.’
He left the room to return to the palace and write his resignation. Those in the room stared at their hands in silence.
‘Very well, Commissaire.’ The Minister’s voice was very quiet. ‘You may continue.’
Lebel resumed his report, relating his request to Thomas in London to trace every missing passport over the previous fifty days.
‘I hope,’ he concluded, ‘to have a short list by this evening of probably no more than one or two who fit the description we already have of the Jackal. As soon as I know, I shall ask the countries of origin of these tourists in London who lost their passports to provide photographs of those people, for we can be sure the Jackal will by now look more like his new identity than like either Calthrop or Duggan or Jensen. With luck I should have these photographs by noon tomorrow.’