M. Goossens

M. Goossens is a Belgian armourer whose specialist work equips The Jackal with a custom rifle for an assassination. Their meetings reveal two complementary forms of preparation: Goossens’s exacting craft turns the weapon into a functional instrument, while his private precautions acknowledge the danger of serving a customer who can erase witnesses as efficiently as he plans an escape.

Identity and Trade

Goossens receives The Jackal at his home and conducts their business in a small office off the hallway. The arrangement is discreet from the outset. Before each visit described in the evidence, The Jackal arrives early and watches the street for half an hour; Goossens, for his part, locks the front door and secures it with a chain after admitting him. Their work is not carried out in an open shop, but in a guarded domestic setting where even a customer’s arrival is treated as a risk to be managed.

The Jackal knows Goossens through the name Alexander Duggan, which he uses when arranging the first appointment. Goossens understands the significance of the visit well enough to speak of the rifle as a commissioned piece of work and to prepare a final fitting. He is not merely handing over a ready-made firearm: the assignment involves a bespoke weapon and another product that, he explains, had to be made from scratch. The evidence does not specify that second item at the first meeting, but the opened case and the later fitting make clear how much of the transaction depends on careful preparation.

The Commission and Its Craft

The schedule has already been set when the first office meeting begins. The Jackal reminds Goossens that he had been promised the gun by August 4 so that he could take it home after returning on August 1. Goossens confirms that the rifle itself is ready and presents it as a work of exceptional quality. His embarrassment concerns the other product, not a failure to complete the gun. The distinction matters: the customer has come expecting a tightly timed commission, and Goossens is anxious to explain that the delay does not compromise the central weapon.

On the desk lies a flat case about two feet long, eighteen inches broad, and four inches deep. Its interior is arranged as a tray, with separate compartments shaped to the components they hold. The case makes the rifle’s initial state visible as an assortment of carefully fitted pieces rather than a single usable weapon. In the later assembly, Goossens supplies a silencer and a telescopic sight. The barrel has been threaded so that the silencer can be screwed into place, and pairs of grooves along its top receive sprung clips beneath the sight. Those fittings keep the telescope parallel to the barrel; small screws allow adjustment of the crossed hairs. The Jackal tests the sight by raising the rifle and aiming, then acknowledges the workmanship. Within minutes, the separate parts have become a high-velocity, long-range, fully silenced assassin’s rifle.

The description gives Goossens’s craft a practical precision rather than treating the weapon as a mysterious device. Its effectiveness comes from the fit of its parts: the threaded barrel, the aligned sight, and the adjustable reticle. The case and its shaped compartments belong to the same logic of ordered construction. Goossens’s contribution is technical and material, but it gives The Jackal the means to carry out a plan that depends on distance, concealment, and accuracy.

Secrecy and Self-Protection

At the first meeting, Goossens admits that the additional product has caused a problem, but he does not appear to challenge the commission or withdraw from it. By the following morning, he telephones to say that the work is finished and asks Alexander Duggan to return with the items needed for a final fitting. The Jackal again arrives early, carrying a small attaché case inside a largely empty fibre suitcase bought second-hand that morning. He watches the street before going to the door; Goossens locks up behind him and closes the office door. The repeated routine makes discretion part of the transaction, not an incidental feature of it.

Goossens’s caution has a concrete safeguard behind it. He has deposited a letter with a lawyer, to be opened if he dies. The letter directs the police to a stone in his back garden; beneath it is a box containing a list of the people expected at his house each day. He replaces the list daily. For the day of The Jackal’s visit, it identifies the sole expected customer as a tall, prosperous-looking Englishman using the name Duggan. The arrangement would leave investigators a lead if Goossens were killed, and The Jackal correctly recognizes that such precautions are in place before Goossens confirms them.

The Jackal does not reassure Goossens by denying the danger. Instead, he reasons that the armourer’s intelligence has prompted him to make preparations and that killing him would create more problems than it would solve. He then draws a hard boundary: Goossens must never disclose the visits or the purchase to anyone, or The Jackal will kill him. The customer’s threat turns the protections that might help expose him into part of his calculation. Goossens is safe only so long as secrecy serves The Jackal’s interests.

Narrative Role

Goossens appears in a limited but consequential role: he is the specialist whose work converts The Jackal’s requirements into a weapon ready for use. The painstaking account of assembly briefly shifts attention from the assassination plan to the rifle’s construction, showing how the threat depends on skilled, individualized labor. At the same time, the meetings reveal that secrecy is unstable. The Jackal can make a silencer fit a barrel and can anticipate Goossens’s precautions, but he cannot make the consequences of a killing disappear; the armourer’s daily list and lawyer-held letter ensure that his customer’s identity could outlast him.

Goossens is therefore both an accomplice in the weapon’s preparation and a vulnerable witness to it. His expertise gives The Jackal a decisive practical advantage, while his precautions expose the narrow margin on which their arrangement rests. The final warning does not establish what Goossens later does or what becomes of him; it leaves the relationship defined by the threat itself, with his silence demanded and his survival conditionally tolerated.