Commissaire Valentin

Commissaire Valentin is the regional police commander who turns the discovery of the Jackal’s abandoned car into a large-scale search around Ussel and Egletons. He supplies the pursuit with local manpower, road inquiries, and reports to Claude Lebel; his part in the hunt shows how much depends on ordinary police work performed quickly across a difficult rural landscape, even when the suspect is already moving beyond the searchers’ reach.

Identity and Authority

Valentin is a commissaire at the regional headquarters of the French Judicial Police in Clermont-Ferrand. When the car’s altered paint and reversed plates identify it as the Alfa Romeo, he receives the news from the motor-maintenance staff and immediately contacts Lebel. He does not yet know why the car matters, but Lebel makes clear that the instruction is urgent and that Valentin should accept his authority without waiting for a formal explanation. Valentin responds by mobilizing officers rather than delaying for procedural clarification.

The search is not a small local inquiry. Lebel asks him to send the strongest team he can assemble to Ussel and to question people across a broad area: farmers, drivers who regularly use the road, village shops and cafés, hotels, and isolated woodcutter’s huts. The officers are to look for a tall, blond Englishman who speaks good French, has three suitcases and a handgrip, carries substantial cash, and may look as though he has slept rough. Lebel also insists that the press be kept away and that any inquiry be disguised as a search for someone lost after a car crash. Valentin is thus charged with both finding a fugitive and protecting the secrecy of the investigation.

Building the Rural Search

As the sun sets, police vans from Clermont-Ferrand and Ussel establish a headquarters in the square of a hamlet near the abandoned car. From a radio van, Valentin directs the squad cars converging on surrounding villages. He begins with a five-mile radius and plans to search through the night, judging that people are more likely to be at home after dark. The terrain complicates that decision: the region’s twisting valleys and hills make it easier for officers to lose their way or miss a remote shelter in darkness. The search therefore depends not just on its scale but on whether local inquiries can turn scattered sightings into a usable route.

The Jackal is already exploiting the time those inquiries require. Near Egletons, a taxi driver who also repairs cars has taken a fare and has not returned. Valentin questions the driver’s distressed wife, learns that the man waits at the station square for the morning train from Ussel and takes passengers when they appear, and restrains his frustration rather than blaming her. He orders a sergeant to watch the station, the square, and the café, with instructions to bring the taxi driver to him as soon as he appears. Valentin then transfers the search headquarters to the Egletons police station, which has not experienced activity on this scale for years.

Pursuit and Information Delays

By the time Valentin reports to Lebel at six-thirty, roadblocks have been placed on every road and track leading out of the area since mid-morning. He estimates that 304 patrols are scouring the roads. Yet the taxi driver remains missing, and Valentin believes the Jackal may still be somewhere within the cordon unless he travelled far after abandoning the car. His estimate is necessarily provisional: the missing driver represents a gap in the chain of evidence, and the search cannot establish the fugitive’s route while that witness is unavailable.

The taxi driver’s wife eventually explains the routine that might locate him, but the Jackal has already used the taxi to leave Egletons. After the fugitive reaches the Château de la Haute Chalonnière, he escapes in Colette de la Chalonnière’s Renault. Valentin reports the departure and the discovery of her body to Lebel: the gardener found her only in the afternoon, having first assumed she was asleep. By then the local search has become a homicide investigation as well as a hunt for the man who left the car. The sequence makes the cost of delay concrete: the fugitive’s transport changes, and another person is dead before the police can close in.

Valentin continues to supply Lebel with the details needed to reconstruct the escape. When Lebel calls him at the Tulle commissariat, Valentin reports the roadblocks and patrols, then conveys the news from Egletons. He also provides the train schedule from Tulle: there are only two trains a day, and the morning train left at 11:50 and was due in Paris at 8:10. The timetable gives Lebel a fresh lead, but it does not mean Valentin has caught up with the passenger; the grey-haired priest has already reached the Gare d’Austerlitz and taken a taxi.

Role in the Manhunt

Valentin’s work is practical and collective: dispatching teams, placing roadblocks, changing headquarters, questioning witnesses, and passing time-sensitive information to Lebel. The expanding search demonstrates the reach of the police response, while its missed connections reveal its limits. Officers must canvass scattered settlements and navigate difficult terrain; the taxi driver is absent when sought; and the suspect changes vehicles and appearance. Valentin does not identify the Jackal or stop him. Instead, his reports help Lebel revise the pursuit as the evidence changes, making him an important regional link in a manhunt whose central difficulty is that each new lead arrives after the fugitive has moved on.