17
THE BLUE ALFA ROMEO cruised into the Place de la Gare at Ussel just before one in the morning. There was one café remaining open across the square from the station entrance, and a few late-night travellers waiting for a train were sipping coffee. The Jackal dragged a comb through his hair and walked past the stacked-up chairs and tables on the terrace and up to the bar counter. He was cold, for the mountain air was chill when driving at over sixty miles an hour; and stiff, with aching thighs and arms from hauling the Alfa through innumerable mountain curves; and hungry, for he had not eaten since dinner twenty-eight hours previously, apart from a buttered roll for breakfast.
He ordered two large buttered slices of a long thin loaf, sliced down the middle and known as a tartine beurrée, and four hard-boiled eggs from the stand on the counter. Also a large white coffee.
While the buttered bread was being prepared and the coffee was percolating through the filter, he glanced round for the telephone booth. There was none, but a telephone stood at the end of the counter.
‘Have you got the local telephone directory?’ he asked the barman. Without a word, still busy, the barman gestured to a pile of directories on a rack behind the counter.
‘Help yourself,’ he said.
The Baron’s name was listed under the words ‘Chalonnière, M. le Baron de la …’ and the address was the château at La Haute Chalonnière. The Jackal knew this, but the village was not listed on his road map. However, the telephone number was given as Egletons, and he found this easily enough. It was another
thirty kilometres beyond Ussel on the RN89. He settled down to eat his eggs and sandwiches.
It was just before two in the morning that he passed a stone by the roadside saying ‘Egletons, 6 km’ and decided to abandon the car in one of the forests that bordered the road. They were dense woods, probably the estate of some local noble, where once boars had been hunted with horse and hound. Perhaps they still were, for parts of Corrèze seem to have stepped straight from the days of Louis the Sun King.
Within a few hundred metres he had found a drive leading into the forest, separated from the road by a wooden pole slung across the entrance, adorned by a placard saying ‘Chasse Privée’. He removed the pole, drove the car into the wood and replaced the pole.
From there he drove half a mile into the forest, the headlamps lighting the gnarled shapes of the trees like ghosts reaching down with angry branches at the trespasser. Finally he stopped the car, switched off the headlights, and took the wire-cutters and torch from the glove compartment.
He spent an hour underneath the vehicle, his back getting damp from the dew on the forest floor. At last the steel tubes containing the sniper’s rifle were free from their hiding place of the previous sixty hours, and he re-packed them in the suitcase with the old clothes and the army greatcoat. He had a last look round the car to make sure there was nothing left in it that could give anyone who found it a hint of who its driver had been, and drove it hard into the centre of a nearby clump of wild rhododendron.
Using the metal shears, he spent the next hour cutting rhododendron branches from nearby bushes and jabbing them into the ground in front of the hole in the shrubbery made by the Alfa, until it was completely hidden from view.
He knotted his tie with one end round the handle of one of the suitcases, the other end round the handle of the second case. Using the tie like a railway porter’s strap, his shoulder under the loop so that one case hung down his chest and the other down his back, he was able to grab the remaining two pieces of baggage in his two free hands and start the march back to the road.
It was slow going. Every hundred yards he stopped, put the cases down and went back over his tracks with a branch from a tree, sweeping away the light impressions made in the moss and twigs by the passage of the Alfa. It took another hour to reach the road, duck under the pole, and put half a mile between himself and the entrance to the forest.
His check suit was soiled and grimy, the polo sweater stuck to his back with greasy obstinacy, and he thought his muscles would never stop aching again. Lining the suitcases up in a row, he sat down to wait as the eastern sky grew a fraction paler than the surrounding night. Country buses, he reminded himself, tend to start early.
In fact he was lucky. A farm lorry towing a trailer of hay came by at 5.50 heading towards the market town.
‘Car broken down?’ bawled the driver as he slowed up.
‘No. I’ve got a weekend pass from camp, so I’m hitch-hiking home. Got as far as Ussel last night and decided to push on to Tulle. I’ve got an uncle there who can fix me a lorry to Bordeaux. This was as far as I got.’ He grinned at the driver, who laughed and shrugged.
‘Crazy, walking through the night up here. No one comes this way after dark. Jump on the trailer, I’ll take you in to Egletons, you can try from there.’
They rolled into the little town at quarter to seven. The Jackal thanked the farmer, gave him the slip round the back of the station and headed for a café.
‘Is there a taxi in town?’ he asked the barman over coffee.
The barman gave him the number and he rang to call up the taxi company. There was one car that would be available in half an hour, he was told. While he waited he used the fundamental conveniences of the cold-water tap offered by the café’s lavatory to wash his face and hands, change into a fresh suit and brush his teeth which felt furry from cigarettes and coffee.
The taxi arrived at 7.30, an old rattletrap Renault.
‘Do you know the village of Haute Chalonnière?’ he asked the driver.
‘ ’Course.’
‘How far?’
‘Eighteen kilometres.’ The man jerked his thumb up towards the mountains. ‘In the hills.’
‘Take me there,’ said the Jackal, and hefted his luggage on to the roof rack, except for one case that went inside with him.
He insisted on being dropped in front of the Café de la Poste in the village square. There was no need for the taxi-driver from the nearby town to know he was going to the château. When the taxi had driven away he brought his luggage into the café. Already the square was blazing hot, and two oxen yoked to a hay-cart ruminated their cud reflectively outside while fat black flies promenaded round their gentle patient eyes.