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The roar of the exploding ammunition filled the small room and was heard in the square. Later press enquiries were met with the explanation that it had been a motor-cycle with a faulty silencer which some ass had kicked into life a few streets away at the height of the ceremony. Half a magazine full of nine-millimetre bullets hit the Jackal in the chest, picked him up, half-turned him in the air and slammed his body into an untidy heap in the far corner near the sofa. As he fell, he brought the standard lamp with him. Down below, the band struck up "Mon Regiment et Ma Patrie'.
Superintendent Thomas had a phone call at six that evening from Paris. He sent for the senior inspector of his staff.
«They got him,» he said. «In Paris. No problems, but you'd better get up to his flat and sort things out.»
It was eight o'clock when the inspector was having a last sort through of Calthrop's belongings that he heard someone come into the open doorway. He turned. A man was standing there scowling at him. A big-built, burly man.
«What are you doing here?» asked the inspector.
«I might ask you just the same thing. What the hell do you think you're doing?»
«All right, that's enough,» said the inspector. «Let's have your name.
“Calthrop,» said the newcomer, «Charles Calthrop. And this is my flat. Now what the hell are you doing to it?»
The inspector wished he carried a gun.
«All right,» he said quietly, warily. «I think you'd better come down to the Yard for a little chat' «Too bloody right,» said Calthrop. «You've got a bit of explaining to do.»
But in fact it was Calthrop who did the explaining. They held him for twenty-four hours, until three separate confirmations came through from Paris that the jackal was dead, and five landlords of isolated taverns in the far north of Sutherland County, Scotland, had testified that Charles Calthrop had indeed spent the previous three weeks indulging his passion for climbing and fishing, and had stayed at their establishments.
«If the Jackal wasn't Calthrop,» asked Thomas of his inspector when Calthrop finally walked out of the door a free man, «then who the hell was he?»
«There can be no question, of course,» said the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police the next day to Assistant Commissioner Dixon and Superintendent Thomas, «of Her Majesty's Government ever conceding that this Jackal fellow was an Englishman at all. So far as one can see there was a period when a certain Englishman came under suspicion. He has now been cleared. We also know that for a period of his… er.., assignment in France, the Jackal feller masqueraded as an Englishman under a falsely issued English passport. But he also masqueraded as a Dane, an American and a Frenchman, under two stolen passports and one set of forged French papers. As far as we are concerned, our enquiries established that the assassin was travelling in France under a false passport in the name of Duggan, and in this name he was traced to… er… this place Gap. That's all. Gentlemen, the case is closed.»
The following day the body of a man was buried in an unmarked grave at a suburban cemetery in Paris. The death certificate showed the body to be that of an u
The day of the Jackal was over.