London

London is both The Jackal’s operational base and a bureaucratic starting point in the pursuit that closes around him. From a Mayfair flat, he studies Charles de Gaulle, builds the papers and disguises needed to travel under false identities, and prepares for departure; later, British passport records and consular inquiries help Superintendent Thomas reconstruct his movements. The city’s importance lies in this overlap: it gives the fugitive room to plan, while supplying the records through which investigators begin to follow him.

A base for preparation

After two months in Lebanon, The Jackal arrives at London Airport on a flight from Beirut. His stay there is not merely a pause between journeys. In the last two weeks of June and the first two of July, he undertakes a deliberate program of research, reading almost everything he can find about Charles de Gaulle. A local lending library’s encyclopaedia entry supplies a bibliography; he then orders books from well-known bookshops under a false name, using a forwarding address in Praed Street, Paddington.

The books are read late into the night in his flat. He retains details that might prove useful, noting personal quirks and traits in a small exercise book, and studies de Gaulle’s memoir, The Edge of the Sword, for the president’s views of life, France, and his own destiny. Yet preparation does not immediately solve the operational problem: by the first week of July, The Jackal still has not determined when, where, or how to make the attempt. He goes to the British Museum reading room and works through back issues of Le Figaro, extending his research from the target’s character to the public information that might reveal an opportunity.

London also accommodates the practical work that makes this planning possible. The Jackal visits different shops for different supplies, including a Chelsea wig and toupee establishment where he obtains hair tints for creating grey or chestnut shades, along with brushes and instructions. His methodical shopping helps keep the separate elements of his preparation from forming an obvious pattern in any one shop.

Constructing a travelling identity

The false British passport is assembled through ordinary institutions rather than an elaborate criminal apparatus. The Jackal searches village cemeteries until he finds the gravestone of Alexander Duggan, a child who died in 1931. At the village church, he presents himself to the vicar as a genealogist and consults the parish records. He then obtains copies of Duggan’s birth and death certificates from the civil records office, destroys the death certificate, and uses the birth record to support a passport application.

Back in London, he fills out the form with Duggan’s age and family details but his own physical description, listing his occupation as businessman. He forges the vicar’s signature, makes a church stamp with a child’s printing set, and sends the application, birth certificate, and postal order to the Passport Office in Petty France. The new passport arrives by post four days later. The effectiveness of the deception depends on familiar documents and small acts of procedural plausibility: the forged reference, the correctly copied family information, and a genuine record of a child whose death has made his identity available to appropriate.

The passport is only one part of the preparation. The Jackal keeps two thousand pounds in a nearly undetectable false bottom in his suitcase, money withdrawn from a private deed-box in a Holborn solicitor’s vault. He buys tickets in cash, avoiding a cheque-book, and arranges clothing so that its labels can be transferred to clerical garments he has acquired in London. Such details make the city less a single hiding place than a workshop for identities, clothing, money, and routes.

Departures and the trail across borders

London is a departure point as well as a place of concealment. After the passport arrives, The Jackal drives to London Airport and flies to Copenhagen, paying cash. In a later departure scene, he clears his flat with the same care he brings to his papers: he disposes of food that could spoil, dresses in a dove-grey suit containing private papers in Duggan’s name, takes cash, and leaves with two pieces of luggage in each hand. At nine-fifteen he walks to South Audley Street and takes a taxi to London Airport. The phone begins ringing in the empty flat as the taxi moves away.

His movements do not make London an isolated point on the map. Investigators later establish that on July 18 he took an evening flight to Copenhagen, buying a ticket at the airline counter in Brussels and paying cash, then returned to England on the evening of August 6. French records show that Duggan entered France from Brussels on July 22 and left Paris for Brussels on July 31. The cross-border sequence exposes the limits of any single city’s records: the investigation must connect British travel inquiries with French border and hotel documentation before the alias becomes a usable lead.

The city as an investigative starting point

When Superintendent Thomas tries to identify a man known only by name, he begins at the Passport Office in Petty France. He obtains copies of six applications from men named Charles Calthrop, along with their photographs, and compares their histories. One application is relatively recent and has no record of a previous application, a circumstance that makes it worth considering but not conclusive. The search illustrates the uncertainty of beginning with a name: records can narrow possibilities, but a missing history may be a clue or simply an absence of information.

As the French inquiry develops, Claude Lebel asks Thomas to help search London consulates for passports reported lost or stolen since July 1. Thomas directs his staff to collect descriptions and passport numbers, initially narrowing the field by sex, broad racial categories, and height. He and Lebel then compare the candidates against airline bookings and the known periods when The Jackal was outside London. The work turns the city’s consular contacts and travel records into a shared investigative resource, although the evidence has to be tested against a precise chronology rather than accepted at face value.

London’s double function gives it its narrative weight. The Jackal exploits the ordinary helpfulness of records, shops, transport, and postal services to make an identity that appears documented; Thomas uses comparable administrative channels to search for inconsistencies and reconstruct movement. The same city that gives the fugitive privacy and mobility supplies the first institutions through which the pursuit can make him visible.