The Jackal abandons his car, hides his rifle, and escapes on foot

Near Egletons, The Jackal abandons the Alfa Romeo sports car MI-61741 not as a hurried surrender of transport but as a carefully prepared change of method. In the early hours, he hides the vehicle, retrieves the sniper rifle concealed beneath it, and works to remove the signs that might connect the car to its driver. By the time Claude Lebel orders a search centered on the vehicle’s discovery, The Jackal has reached the road on foot. The episode makes concealment itself an action: the forest hides both the machinery of escape and the evidence that could identify its user.

Choosing the hiding place

Shortly before two in the morning, The Jackal passes a roadside marker placing Egletons six kilometres ahead and decides to leave the car in the woods bordering the road. The village was not marked on his road map, but he had obtained the Baron’s address at the Château de la Haute Chalonnière and learned that its telephone number was listed under Egletons, about thirty kilometres beyond Ussel on the RN89. He had eaten eggs and sandwiches before setting out into the night; the turn from travelling to concealment comes after that brief pause, when the remaining distance gives him a precise reason to stop.

Within a few hundred metres, he finds a drive closed by a wooden pole and marked as private hunting ground. He removes the pole, drives into the forest, and puts it back in place. The barrier is not an elaborate disguise, but restoring it helps leave the entrance looking undisturbed. He then drives about half a mile farther among the trees before switching off the headlights. The car is now far enough from the road to be out of ordinary view, but its hiding place still has to be made secure.

Retrieving the rifle and concealing the car

The Jackal takes wire-cutters and a torch from the glove compartment and spends an hour beneath the vehicle. His back grows damp against the dew-covered forest floor while he frees the steel tubes that contain the sniper rifle. The weapon has been hidden there for sixty hours; its recovery is therefore not an improvised response to danger but the completion of a planned stage in transporting it. He repacks the tubes in a suitcase with old clothes and an army greatcoat, then checks the car for anything that might offer a clue to its driver.

He drives the vehicle into the middle of a nearby clump of wild rhododendron and uses metal shears to cut branches from the surrounding bushes. For the next hour, he jabs them into the ground across the opening made by the car, until the vehicle is hidden from view. The task is slow and physical: the forest has provided cover, but only his deliberate work makes that cover effective. The abandoned car is left as an object for someone else to discover, with its most incriminating cargo removed and its outline obscured by vegetation.

Erasing the route on foot

The luggage presents a separate problem. The Jackal knots his tie around the handles of two cases and uses it as a porter’s strap, carrying one case against his chest and another behind him while holding the remaining two pieces of baggage in his hands. The arrangement lets him move all his belongings away from the car in a single trip, but makes the return journey cumbersome.

Every hundred yards, he puts the cases down and walks back over his own route with a branch, sweeping away the light marks his passage has left in the moss and twigs. It takes another hour to reach the road, pass beneath the pole, and put half a mile between himself and the forest entrance. This backward erasure links the concealment of the car to the concealment of his movements: he does not merely leave the vehicle out of sight, but tries to prevent the approach to it from becoming a trail. By then his check suit is dirty, his polo sweater clings to his back, and his muscles ache. He sits with the suitcases as the eastern sky begins to pale, waiting for a chance to move on. At 5:50 a farm lorry towing a hay trailer passes toward the market town; the account establishes its arrival, not what happens after it passes.

The search and the false center

The police response shows how the hidden car changes the shape of the pursuit. Shortly before six, Commissaire Valentin of the Regional Headquarters of the PJ at Clermont-Ferrand tells Lebel that the vehicle has been found. Lebel orders a team to Ussel and directs it to make the car’s location the centre of a square search. Officers are to ask at farmhouses, among farmers who regularly use the road, and at village shops, cafés, hotels, and woodcutters’ huts. Their enquiries are to establish where a tall, blond Englishman speaking good French went, what he tried to buy, and where he had been seen; he may look as though he has slept rough and is carrying three suitcases and a handgrip.

Lebel also insists that the press be kept away, authorizing a cover story about a car crash and a possibly dazed occupant. Most importantly, if the searchers locate the fugitive, they are to surround him and hold their position rather than approach him. The police must work outward from the car without turning its discovery into a direct confrontation. Meanwhile, records checked through the night establish that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22 and was recorded travelling back toward Brussels on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31. A hotel card under Duggan’s name places him near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. These records add an identity and a route to the wider manhunt, but they do not undo the immediate advantage The Jackal has gained by leaving the car behind. The episode’s tension lies in that mismatch: the vehicle gives the investigators a centre for their search, while its driver has already separated himself from it and its traces.