The Jackal kills the baroness and disguises himself to flee to Paris

The Jackal kills the baroness and disguises himself to flee to Paris after Colette de la Chalonnière discovers the disassembled rifle concealed in his luggage. Her discovery turns a carefully prepared escape into an immediate murder and identity change: the Jackal leaves the château wearing the clothes and papers of a Danish pastor, abandons the Alexander Duggan identity, and boards a train for Paris. The episode joins the private violence of his flight to the public manhunt, showing how one exposure forces him to discard a useful identity without abandoning his larger plan.

The manhunt closes in

The danger at the château belongs to a wider contest over information and time. Claude Lebel receives the assignment directly from the Minister of the Interior, after reading the report on the plot in a room full of senior officials. The directive gives him his own office, unrestricted access to information, the resources of the agencies represented at the meeting, and no spending limit. Lebel turns those powers into practical arrangements: Caron becomes his confidential assistant, a camp bed and coffee are brought in, and ten outside telephone lines are reserved for the investigation.

Lebel’s first international inquiries underline how little the police know. He approaches foreign police chiefs discreetly, explaining that the authorities have only a poor description and not even a name. What distinguishes the unknown man, he says, is that he must be a leading political contract killer with successful assassinations behind him. The target is left unstated, but the implications are clear to the investigators listening: the threat is directed at the President.

The difficulty is not only identifying the assassin but determining where he stands in a timetable known only to himself. After seventy-two hours of investigation, Lebel warns that the killer may already be in France or even Paris, where the Jackal repeatedly changes identities and plans the assassination. The police know that the plot has been exposed in principle, but cannot tell how much of their progress the assassin knows. Their best chance, Lebel reasons, is to identify him under his new name and locate him before he realizes how close they are.

Colette discovers the rifle

At the château, a telephone call changes the Jackal’s plans. After hanging up, he recalls a soft click on the line, unlike the calls of the previous three days. He suspects someone may have been listening and goes upstairs. Colette is in the bedroom among the open suitcases, which she has unlocked with his keys. Slim steel tubes lie around her; one reveals a telescopic sight, another the end of a silencer, and she is holding the rifle’s barrel and breech.

Colette recognizes the weapon as a killer’s gun and understands that the Jackal intends to kill the President with it. His silence confirms her accusation. She rushes for the door, but he catches her, throws her onto the bed, and stops her scream with a blow to the neck before killing her with a strike to the back of the neck. The discovery is decisive because it strips away the harmless appearance of the hidden equipment: Colette has seen both the weapon and the purpose for which he brought it to the château.

The Jackal acts quickly to contain what she has learned. He listens at the bedroom door; the servants downstairs make no response, and their deafness helps explain why the struggle has drawn no alarm. He returns the rifle components to their tubes and packs them into the third suitcase with the army greatcoat and soiled clothes belonging to André Martin. He checks that the papers have not been disturbed. The suitcase containing the clothes of the Danish pastor, Per Jensen, has not been searched, leaving him a prepared alternative identity.

A new identity and a hurried departure

The change into Pastor Jensen is deliberate and physical. After washing and shaving, the Jackal cuts the ends from his long blond hair, dyes it iron-grey, and brushes it into the style shown in the pastor’s passport. He puts in blue-tinted contact lenses, then dresses in the clothing bought in Copenhagen, adding a black bib and a clerical collar beneath a black suit. Gold-rimmed glasses, the pastor’s passport, money, and a Danish book on French cathedrals complete the disguise. He removes the traces of the dye and washing preparations, packs his toiletries, and leaves the body behind while preparing to get out.

The departure is staged to delay discovery. The Jackal lowers four cases from the bedroom window on a looped sheet, locks the bedroom door from inside, and arranges Colette’s body on the bed as if she were naturally asleep, with the clothes tucked up to her chin. He slips out through the window and drops to the lawn. Ernestine sees Madame’s Renault roar out of the converted stable and drive away, but the untouched coffee and locked bedroom doors give her no immediate explanation. The household’s ordinary morning routines have briefly concealed a murder and a disappearance.

The Duggan trail and the journey to Paris

The police are independently reconstructing the movements of Alexander Duggan from records rather than from a confirmed sighting. An archive card shows that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on July 22 and left on the Etoile du Nord Express on July 31. A hotel card places him near the Place de la Madeleine from July 22 through July 30. Lebel chooses to speak quietly with the proprietor rather than stage a raid, and learns that Duggan was no longer there by August 15.

Later, Lebel connects the Jackal’s departure from Gap to a likely warning. The assassin must have obtained paint to transform his car; if the car was already changed on the overnight journey toward Ussel, Lebel reasons, the paint was probably bought in Gap. That would mean the Jackal had been alerted to the discovery of the Duggan identity and left quickly. Lebel cannot establish where the leak originated, but suspects the message may have passed through the Jackal’s sole contact, Valmy. The warning matters because it explains the sudden flight without proving that the assassin has called off his mission.

Near Tulle, the Jackal throws the suitcase containing his English clothes and Duggan passport from a bridge into a ravine. He then parks away from the station and walks there with his remaining luggage. At the booking office he buys a second-class ticket to Paris. A young CRS officer stops him and examines the Danish passport, but cannot understand it. The train arrives at Tulle at one o’clock; among its passengers is a grey-haired Protestant pastor who settles into a compartment with two women, puts on his reading glasses, and opens his book on churches and cathedrals. His expected arrival in Paris is ten past eight.

The escape sharpens the pursuit rather than ending it. When Lebel receives news from Commissaire Valentin in Tulle, he learns that fingerprints from the car and château room produce hundreds of matching sets, offering no simple identification. He also realizes that the Jackal’s week of apparent delay was not wasted time: the assassin had selected his day. The later report that an old, apparently ill man with a disabled veteran’s card was allowed through a street barrier shows how the Jackal’s disguises can exploit routine acts of access. By the time the police understand the purpose of his delay, he has reached Paris under a new name and retained the freedom to choose when to strike.