The Jackal's forged identity papers

The Jackal's forged identity papers are both a practical tool of concealment and a point of vulnerability in his attempt to evade identification. Their three cards offer carefully differentiated versions of the same man: a usable driving licence, a worn French identity card under the name André Martin, and a third card whose retouched photograph suggests a separate occasion. The papers are convincing enough for the Jackal's purposes, but their production leaves a trail of originals and images in another man's hands. Later, the documentary systems that make false identities useful also help investigators reconstruct the movements of Alexander James Quentin Duggan.

Composition and Craft

The set is presented on a small round table in the Belgian forger's photographic studio. Its first card is a driving licence issued in the name of Alexander James Quentin Duggan, of W1. It gives a validity period from 10 December 1960 through 9 December 1963 and authorizes him to drive specified groups of motor vehicles. The licence number is imaginary, but the card also carries the official-sounding marks of the London County Council and the Road Traffic Act 1960, along with a recorded fee. The Jackal judges the result a perfect forgery for his purposes.

The second card is a French identity card for André Martin, a fictitious fifty-three-year-old born at Colmar and resident in the capital. Its photograph is not a simple copy of the Jackal's current appearance: it makes him look twenty years older, with iron-grey hair cut close, and gives him a blurred, embarrassed expression. The card is stained and dog-eared, suggesting the ordinary wear of a working man's document rather than a newly manufactured prop. Its credibility rests partly on this unremarkable surface.

The third specimen extends the effect through small differences rather than a wholly new face. It bears another portrait of the Jackal, taken nearly two weeks earlier, but retouched to suggest a darker shirt and a trace of stubble. The issue dates on the two cards differ by several months, as if their renewals had not fallen due together. The altered image thus appears to show the same man photographed at another time and in different clothes. The Jackal notices the distinction, recognizes the skilled draughtsmanship, and pockets the cards.

The Forger's Leverage

The documents are not the whole package. The Belgian has kept the original front page of the driving licence, which he says bears the Jackal's real name, in a private bank deed-box that only he can open. He also retains the developed photographic plates and all the negatives, as well as a picture taken quickly while the Jackal stood beneath the studio arc lamps without his make-up. Those materials could expose the Englishman to British and French authorities even if the cards themselves pass casual inspection.

The Jackal treats the proposed exchange as a blackmail risk, not merely a question of price. He points out that the forger could demand money again if negatives had been copied or if another person held the documents. The Belgian denies having a partner and argues that repeated demands would undermine his own arrangement: a photostat of the licence would be a limited threat, while the Jackal could discard the French cards and commission replacements if given enough time. The forger's actual leverage is the Jackal's need to keep these particular papers, and to keep them without delay. Replacing them would take longer and might produce inferior work.

The exchange therefore trades on convenience as much as secrecy. The Jackal pays the demanded one thousand pounds for the papers and the forger's silence, while the Belgian keeps the originals and photographic evidence secured in the deed-box. The scene makes clear that the cards' quality cannot erase their dependence on the person who made them. They help the Jackal pass as someone else, yet the same act of manufacture has created a private archive capable of undoing that performance.

Use and Exposure

After the Belgian meeting, the Jackal keeps the three cards inside his suit. He leaves his rifle in an unobtrusive suitcase deposited at the station's left-luggage office and departs by plane for London. By the time he reaches his flat, the papers are among the completed preparations for his operation; the document set is portable, while the weapon remains separately concealed. The account records that he is one thousand six hundred pounds poorer when he leaves the Amigo, a final measure of the cost of preparation rather than a breakdown of what each individual item cost.

The later records concerning Duggan reveal how a false identity can also become a searchable trail. An overnight review of the French archives uncovers a card showing that Alexander James Quentin Duggan entered France on the Brabant Express from Brussels on 22 July. A second report places Duggan on the Etoile du Nord Express travelling from the capital back to Brussels on 31 July. The police also find a hotel registration card made out in Duggan's name, with a passport number matching information supplied from London. It records a stay at a small hotel near the Place de la Madeleine from 22 to 30 July. These records connect the name to a route and a lodging, even though the discovery does not itself establish that the André Martin card was used for those movements.

The scale of French record-keeping gives those fragments their force. The Renseignements généraux archives hold four and a half million personal dossiers arranged along five and a half miles of shelves, as well as fingerprints and millions of cards generated by border crossings and hotel registrations. Cards from hotels in the capital go instead to the Prefecture of Police, while the DST examines arriving travellers' disembarkation cards at points of entry. Duggan's movements can therefore be recovered from records held across more than one system. The false papers exploit official categories—name, photograph, address, licence, and identity—but each category is also a possible point of comparison.

Place in the Manhunt

Once the search becomes a mass operation, the vulnerability is no longer confined to the forger's private deed-box. Investigators check hotel lists, question people across the capital, inspect papers in the streets and at roadblocks, and enlist both state personnel and people in the city's underworld. More than seventy young men who resemble the wanted killer are questioned and released; the nationwide effort involves a hundred thousand state employees and an estimated fifty thousand people from the underworld and its margins. In that climate, a false card is not a guarantee of invisibility. It is an account of who its bearer claims to be, tested against records, photographs, travel reports, and the observations of others.

The papers' central contradiction is that they must be convincing enough to survive inspection but specific enough to support a usable life. The Duggan licence carries dates, vehicle classes, and administrative detail; the Martin card supplies a plausible French identity and a visibly aged face. Yet those particulars can be filed, cross-checked, and searched. The Jackal's forged identity papers make disguise operational, while the archives and the forger's retained evidence show why identity cannot be secured by appearance alone.