‘I hope,’ he said quietly, ‘that the Colonel is right. But I fear he may not be.’
‘Why?’ The Minister’s question cut like a knife.
‘Because,’ explained Lebel mildly, ‘his theory, although logical if indeed Calthrop has decided to call off the operation, is based on the theory that he has indeed made that decision. Supposing he has not? Supposing he has either not received Rodin’s message or received it but decided to press ahead nevertheless?’
There was a buzz of deprecatory consternation. Only Rolland did not join in. He gazed contemplatively down the table at Lebel. What he was thinking was that Lebel had a far better brain than anyone present seemed prepared to give him credit for. Lebel’s ideas, he recognised, could well be as realistic as his own.
It was at this point that the call came through for Lebel. This time he was gone for over twenty minutes. When he came back he spoke to a completely silent assembly for a further ten minutes.
‘What do we do now?’ asked the Minister when he had finished. In his quiet way, without seeming to hurry, Lebel issued his orders like a general deploying his troops, and none of the men in the room, all senior to him in rank, disputed a word.
‘So there we are,’ he concluded, ‘we will all conduct a quiet and discreet nationwide search for Duggan in his new appearance, while the British police search the records of airline ticket offices, cross-Channel ferries, etc. If they locate him first, they pick him up if he is on British soil, or inform us if he has left it. If we locate him, inside France, we arrest him. If he is located in a third country, we can either wait for him to enter unsuspectingly and pick him up at the border, or … take another course of action. At that moment, however, I think my task of finding him will have been achieved. However, until that moment, gentlemen, I would be grateful if you would agree to do this my way.’
The effrontery was so bold, the assurance so complete, that nobody would say a thing. They just nodded. Even Saint-Clair de Villauban was silent.
It was not until he was at home shortly after midnight that he found an audience to listen to his torrent of outrage at the thought of this ridiculous little bourgeois policeman having been right, while the top experts of the land had been wrong.
His mistress listened to him with sympathy and understanding, massaging the back of his neck as he lay face down on their bed. It was not until just before dawn, when he was sound asleep, that she could slip away to the hall and make a brief phone call.
Superintendent Thomas looked down at the two separate application forms for passports, and two photographs, spread out on the blotter in the pool of light thrown by the reading lamp.
‘Let’s run through it again,’ he ordered the senior inspector seated beside him. ‘Ready?’
‘Sir.’
‘Calthrop: height, five feet eleven inches. Check?’
‘Sir.’
‘Duggan: height, six feet.’
‘Thickened heels, sir. You can raise your height up to two and a half inches with special shoes. A lot of short people in show business do it for vanity. Besides, at a passport counter no one looks at your feet.’
‘All right,’ agreed Thomas, ‘thick-heeled shoes. Calthrop: colour of hair, brown. That doesn’t mean much, it could vary from pale brown to chestnut brown. He looks to me here as if he had dark brown hair. Duggan also says, brown. But he looks like a pale blond.’
‘That’s true, sir. But hair habitually looks darker in photographs. It depends on the light, where it is placed and so forth. And then again, he could have tinted it paler to become Duggan.’
‘All right. I’ll wear that. Calthrop, colour of eyes, brown. Duggan, colour of eyes, grey.’
‘Contact lenses, sir, it’s a simple thing.’
‘OK. Calthrop’s age is thirty-seven, Duggan’s is thirty-four last April.’
‘He had to become thirty-four,’ explained the inspector, ‘because the real Duggan, the little boy who died at two and a half, was born in April 1929. That couldn’t be changed. But nobody would query a man who happened to be thirty-seven but whose passport said he was thirty-four. One would believe the passport.’
Thomas looked at the two photographs. Calthrop looked heftier, fuller in the face, a more sturdily built man. But to become Duggan he could have changed his appearance. Indeed, he had probably changed it even for his first meeting with the OAS chiefs, and remained with changed appearance ever since, including the period when he applied for the false passport. Men like this evidently had to be able to live in a second identity for months at a time if they were to escape identification. It was probably by being this shrewd and painstaking that Calthrop had managed to stay off every police file in the world. If it had not been for that bar rumour in the Caribbean they would never have got him at all.
But from now on he had become Duggan, dyed hair, tinted contact lenses, slimmed-down figure, raised heels. It was the description of Duggan, with passport number and photograph, that he sent down to the telex room to be transmitted to Paris. Lebel, he estimated, glancing at his watch, should have them all by two in the morning.
‘After that, it’s up to them,’ suggested the inspector.
‘Oh, no, boyo, after that there’s a lot more work to be done,’ said Thomas maliciously. ‘First thing in the morning we start checking the airline ticket offices, the cross-Channel ferries, the continental train ticket offices … the whole lot. We not only have to find out who he is now, but where he is now.’
At that moment a call came through from S
omerset House. The last of the passport applications had been checked, and all were in order.
‘OK, thank the clerks and stand down. Eight-thirty sharp in my office, the lot of you,’ said Thomas.