The Day of the Jackal

The second of the two young detective inspectors in Bryn Thomas's office closed the last of the folders he had been allotted to read and looked across at his superior.

His colleague had also finished, and his conclusion had been the same. Thomas himself had finished five minutes before and had walked over to the window, standing with his back to the room and wring at the traffic flowing past in the dusk. Unlike Assistant Commissioner Mallinson, he did not have a view of the river, just a first-floor vista of the cars churning down Horseferry Road. He felt like death. His throat was raw from cigarettes, which he knew he should not have been, smoking with a heavy cold, but could not give up, particularly when under pressure.

His head ached from the fumes, the incessant calls that had been made throughout the afternoon checking on characters turned up in the records and files. Each call-back had been negative. Either the man was fully accounted for, or simply not of the calibre to undertake a mission like killing the French President.

«Right, that's it, then,» he said firmly, spinning round from the window. «We've done all we can, and there just isn't anybody who could possibly fit the guide-lines laid down in the request we have been investigating.»

«It could be that there is an Englishman who does this kind of work,» suggested one of the inspectors… «But he's not on our files.»

«They're all on our files, look you,» growled Thomas. It did not amuse him to think that as interesting a fish as a professional assassin existed in his «manor' without being on file somewhere, and his temper was not improved by his cold or his headache. When illtempered his Welsh accent tended to intensify. Thirty years away from the valleys had never quite eradicated the lilt.

«After all,” said the other inspector, «a political killer is an extremely rare bird. There probably isn't such a thing in this country. It's not quite the English cup of tea, is it?»

Thomas glowered back. He preferred the word British to describe the inhabitants of the United Kingdom, and the inspector's inadvertent use of the word English he suspected might be a veiled suggestion that the Welsh, Scottish or Irish could well have produced such a man. But it wasn't.

«All right, pack up the files. Take them back to registry. I'll reply that a thorough search has revealed no such character known to us. That's all we can do.»

«Who was the enquiry from, Super?» asked one.

«Never you mind, boy. Someone's got problems by the look of it, but it isn't us.»

The two younger men had gathered up all the material and headed for the door. Both had families to get home to, and one was expecting to become a first-time father almost any day. He was the first to the door. The other turned back with a thoughtful frown.

«Super, there's one thing occurred to me while I was checking. If there is such a man, and he's got British nationality, it seems he probably wouldn't operate here anyway. I mean, even a man like that has to have a base somewhere. A refuge, sort of, a place to come back to. Chances are such a man is a respectable citizen in his own country.»

«What are you getting at, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde?»

«Well, something like that. I mean, if there is a professional killer about of the type we've been trying to track, and he's big enough for somebody to pull the kind of weight to get an investigation like this started, with a man of your rank leading it, well the man in question must be big. And if he's that, in his field, he must have a few jobs behind him. Otherwise he wouldn't be anything, would he?»

«Go on,» said Thomas, watching him carefully.

«Well, I just thought that a man like that would probably operate only outside his own country. So he wouldn't normally come to the attention of the internal security forces. Perhaps the Service might have got wind of him once…»

Thomas considered the idea, then slowly shook his head. «Forget it, get on home, boy. I'll write the report. And just forget we ever made the enquiry.»