moment of decision-taking; the realisation came without effort that she wanted him badly, between her thighs, inside her belly, all night.
She felt the door behind her open inwards, broke the embrace and stepped backwards into her room.
«Viens, pritmitif.»
He stepped into the room and closed the door.
Throughout the night every archive in the Pantheon was checked again, this time for the name of Duggan, and with more success. A card was unearthed showing that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22nd. An hour later another report from the same frontier post, the Customs unit that regularly travels on the express trains from Brussels to Paris and back, doing its task while the train is in motion, was found with Duggan's name among those passengers on the Etoile du Nord Express from Paris to Brussels on July 31 st.
From the Prefecture of Police came a hotel card filled out in the name of Duggan, and quoting a passport number that matched the one Duggan was carrying, as contained in the information from London, showing that he had stayed in a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine between July 22nd and 30th inclusive.
Inspector Caron was all for raiding the hotel, but Lebel preferred to pay a quiet visit in the small hours of the morning and had a chat with the proprietor. He was satisfied the man he sought was not at the hotel by August 15th, and the proprietor was grateful for the Commissaire's discretion in not waking all his guests.
Lebel ordered a plain-clothes detective to check into the hotel as a guest until further notice, and to stay there without moving outside, in case Duggan turned up again. The proprietor was happy to cooperate.
«This July visit,» Lebel told Caron when he was back in his office at 4.30, «was a reconnaissance trip. Whatever he has got planned, it's all laid on.»
Then he lay back in his chair, gazed at the ceiling, and thought. Why did he stay in a hotel? Why not in the house of one of the OAS sympathisers, like all the other OAS agents on the run? Because he does not trust the OAS sympathisers to keep their mouths shut. He's quite right. So he works alone, trusting nobody, plotting and planning his own operation in his own way, using a false passport, probably behaving normally, politely, raising no suspicion. The proprietor of the hotel whom he had just interviewed confirmed this, «A real gentleman,» he had said. A real gentleman, thought Lebel, and dangerous as a snake. They are always the worst kind, for a policeman, the real gentlemen. Nobody ever suspected them.
He glanced at the two photographs that had come in from London, of Calthrop and Duggan. Calthrop become Duggan, with a change of height, hair and eyes, age and, probably, manner. He tried to build up a mental image of the man. What would he be like to meet? Confident, arrogant, assured of his immunity. Dangerous, devious, meticulous, leaving nothing to chance. Armed of course, but with what? An automatic under the left armpit? A throwing knife lashed against the ribs? A rifle? But where would he put it when he went through Customs? How would he get near to General de Gaulle carrying such a thing, when even women's handbags were suspect within twenty yards of the President, and men with long packages were hustled away without ceremony from anywhere near a public appearance by the President? Mon Dieu, and that colonel from the Elysee thinks he's just another thug! Lebel was aware he had one advantage: he knew the killer's new name, and the killer did not know that he knew. That was his only ace; apart from that it all lay with the Jackal, and nobody at the evening conference could or would realise it.
If he ever gets wind of what you know before you catch him, and changes his identity again, Claude my boy, he thought, you are going to be up against it in a big way.
Aloud, he said «Really up against it: Caron looked up.
«You're right, chief. He hasn't a chance.»
Lebel was short-tempered with him, which was unusual. The lack of sleep must be beginning to tell.
The finger of light from the waning moon beyond the window panes withdrew slowly across the rumpled coverlet and back towards the casement. It picked out the rumpled satin dress between the door and the foot of the bed, the discarded brassiere and limp nylons scattered on the carpet. The two figures on the bed were muffled in shadow.
Colette lay on her back and gazed up at the ceiling, the fingers of one hand running idly through the blond hair of the head pillowed on her belly. Her lips parted in a half-smile as she thought back over the night.
He had been good, this English primitive, hard but skilled, knowing how to use fingers and tongue and prick to bring her on five times and himself three. She could still feel the blazing heat going into her when he came, and she knew how badly she had needed a night like this for so long when she responded as she had not for years.
She glanced at the small travelling clock beside the bed. It said a quarter past five. She tightened her grip in the blond hair and pulled.
«Hey.»
The Englishman muttered, half asleep. They were both lying naked among the disordered sheets, but the central heating kept the room comfortably warm. The blond head disengaged itself from her hand and slid between her thighs. She could feel the tickle of the hot breath and the tongue flickering in search again.
«No, no more.»
She closed her thighs quickly, sat up and grabbed the hair, raising his face until she could look at him. He eased himself up the bed, plunged his face on to one of her full heavy breasts and started to kiss.
«I said no.»
He looked up at her.
«That's enough, lover. I have to get up in two hours, and you have to go back to your room. Now, my little English, now.»
He got the message and nodded, swinging off the bed to stand on the floor, looking round for his clothes. She slid under the bedclothes, sorted them out from the mess around her knees and pulled them up to the chin. When he was dressed, with jacket and tie slung over one arm, he looked down at her in the half-darkness and she saw the gleam of teeth as he grinned. He sat on the edge of the bed and ran his right hand round to the back of her neck. His face was a few inches from hers.
«It was good?»
«Mmmmmm. It was very good. And you?»
He grinned again. «What do you think?»
She laughed. «What is your name?»
He thought for a moment. «Alex,» he lied.
«Well, Alex it was very good. But it is also time you went back to your own room.»
He bent down and gave her a kiss on the lips.
«In that case, good night, Colette' A second later he was gone, and the door closed behind him.
At seven in the morning, as the sun was rising, a local gendarme cycled up to the Hotel du Cerf' dismounted and entered the lobby. The proprietor who was already up and busy behind the reception desk organising the morning calls and cafe complet for the guests in their rooms, greeted him.
«Alors, bright and early?»
«As usual,» said the gendarme. «It's a long ride out here on a bicycle, and I always leave you till the last.»
«Don't tell me,» grinned the proprietor, «we do the best breakfast coffee in the neighbourhood. Marie-Louise, bring Monsieur a cup of coffee, and no doubt he'll take it laced with a little Trou Normand.»
The country constable grinned with pleasure.
«Here are the cards,» said the proprietor, handing over the little white cards filled in the previous evening by the newly arrived guests. «There were only three new ones last night.»
The constable took the cards and put them in the leather pouch on his belt.
«Hardly worth turning up for,» he grinned, but sat on the foyer bench and waited for his coffee and calvados, exchanging a few words of lustful banter with Marie-Louise when she best it.
It was not until eight that he got back to the gendarmerie and commissariat of Gap with his pouchful of hotel registration cards. These were then taken by the station inspector who flicked through them idly and put them in the rack, to be taken later in the day to the regional headquarters at Lyons, and later to the archives of Central Records in Paris. Not that he could see the point of it all.
As the inspector was dropping the cards into the rack in the commissariat, Madame Colette de is Chalonniere
