Anthony Mallinson

Anthony Mallinson is the Assistant Commissioner for Crime at Scotland Yard who responds to Claude Lebel’s request for discreet help during the search for a political assassin. His part is brief but consequential: without turning the matter into a formal police inquiry, he uses his authority to check British records and route the question to the branch responsible for political threats. His measured response shows how the manhunt begins to cross borders through personal trust and carefully restricted official channels.

Identity and first contact

Shortly before four in the morning, Mallinson is at home in Bexley when the insistent ringing of the telephone wakes him. His wife, Lily, is disturbed by the conversation beside her. The caller explains that the matter is urgent and requires discretion, and that he is assisting Lebel. Rather than ask Scotland Yard to open a routine enquiry, Lebel wants a person-to-person call at the Yard’s communications room at nine that morning. Mallinson agrees to be there.

The request initially leaves him wary. He knows Lebel, but the proposed contact is neither an ordinary exchange between cooperating police forces nor a clearly defined investigation. Mallinson considers the distinction important: if a crime had been committed, or a criminal had fled to Britain, the official basis for assistance would be plain. Here, the need for secrecy is itself part of the problem. He has no wish to become involved in a foreign force’s clandestine business without understanding what it entails.

Discretion and inference

Mallinson recalls a previous, deliberately quiet assistance operation. In that case, a Cabinet Minister had wanted his underage daughter found and brought back without press attention after she had gone away with a young man. Italian police helped locate the couple in Verona. The memory gives Mallinson a practical analogy for Lebel’s request: police contacts outside formal procedures could serve a legitimate purpose when publicity would be harmful. He decides that this is what the Old Boy network is for and agrees to take the call.

After the call, he understands more than the formal wording has disclosed. Lebel has apparently received a tip that a top-class assassin is at large and that the threat concerns France. Mallinson reasons that there is only one plausible French target for such a killer in August 1963. He also recognizes Lebel’s predicament from the perspective of a long-serving police officer: the French investigator is trying to act on a grave warning while knowing very little about the suspect. Mallinson’s sympathy is captured in a quiet remark to himself as he looks down at the river from his office overlooking the Thames.

The political background makes discretion more than a matter of procedure. Mallinson knows that Charles de Gaulle’s rebuff of Britain’s Common Market bid, seven months earlier, has been followed by hostile commentary encouraged through the London Foreign Office. He briefly considers whether the British government might exploit the French crisis for political revenge. The suspicion is not evidence of a British plot; it registers the diplomatic atmosphere in which Lebel’s request arrives, and helps explain why Mallinson is reluctant to expose it through routine channels.

Records and referral

Mallinson asks his personal assistant, John, to contact Chief Superintendent Markham at Central Records. The instruction is explicitly personal, and Mallinson tells John that he cannot yet explain why he is making the request. He wants every existing record of known living professional assassins in Britain checked. The unusual subject prompts John to question the request, but Mallinson does not broaden the discussion; secrecy depends on limiting knowledge while still getting the work done.

The resulting search finds seventeen known contract killers from the underworld: ten are in prison and seven are at large. None fits Lebel’s description. They work for major gangs, in Britain or other principal cities, and Markham judges them unsuitable for an attack on a visiting politician. He suggests Special Branch instead. The negative result does not identify the assassin, but it narrows what the British records can offer: the threat is not accounted for by the known gangland killers in Central Records.

Mallinson turns the check into a controlled paper trail. He resumes a half-finished memorandum and records that no person matching the submitted description could be traced in Criminal Records. He then notes that the enquiry has been passed to the Assistant Commissioner, Special Branch. He signs the memo, keeps its circulation tightly divided, and destroys the remaining copies as classified waste. One copy goes to the Commissioner, another into the locked Secret Correspondence file, and a third stays in Mallinson’s inside pocket. The handling preserves an official record while sharply restricting who can see it.

Special Branch and narrative role

Mallinson spends twenty minutes with Assistant Commissioner Dixon, handing him the remaining copy intended for the Commissioner. He presents the transfer as a matter more suited to Dixon’s responsibilities, which include monitoring people who might attempt to assassinate visiting politicians. At the same time, Mallinson says he doubts Britain contains anyone of the required calibre and expects a thorough records check to establish that Scotland Yard cannot help. His caution does not prevent action: he makes the referral while remaining uncertain about the scale and source of the danger.

Mallinson’s contribution is therefore not a solution to Lebel’s problem but a carefully bounded extension of the investigation. He recognizes the likely target without requiring Lebel to name him, tests the British records, and moves the question from Criminal Records to Special Branch. The sequence also makes the search’s institutional difficulty visible. A suspect who is neither an ordinary gangland killer nor yet the subject of an openly stated crime can fall between established categories; personal judgment and restricted channels are needed to make the machinery respond. Mallinson supplies that bridge, while his concern about diplomatic motives and his insistence on controlled documentation keep the assistance both useful and guarded.