The Stone Leopard (23 page)

Unlike Inspector Rochat of Strasbourg, Inspector Dorre of Colmar was only forty and he took nothing for granted. Saturnine-faced, impatient, a fast-talking man, he phoned Boisseau two hours after the death of Robert Philip had been discovered, explaining that there had been no surveillance on Philip after the Frenchman had returned home apart from observation by a routine patrol-car. 'We are very short of men,' he went on, 'so I was unable to obtain personnel for a proper surveillance, which is regrettable. . .'

At the other end of the line Boisseau guessed that someone higher up had been unhelpful—because they had resented Paris's intrusion into their backyard. This time he had neither the necessity nor even the opportunity to ask probing questions: Dorre went on talking like a machine gun.

`According to the medical examiner and my own observation there is no doubt at all that Robert Philip died by accident when he slipped and caught the back of his skull on the edge of his bath. He was alone in the house at the time and there are no signs of forcible entry or anything which would indicate foul play—although there had been a woman in the house, but probably only for a few hours. Philip was like that. . .'

There was a brief pause, then the voice started up again. `Pardon, but I have a cold and had to blow my nose. So, technically, it is an accidental death. For myself; I do not believe it for a moment. I have heard that another man you also requested to be put under surveillance—a Leon Jouvel hanged himself in Strasbourg less than forty-eight hours ago. I have also heard—I was in Strasbourg yesterday—that my colleagues are satisfied that Jouvel committed suicide. For me, it is too much. M. Boisseau—two men you ask to have put under surveillance both die in their homes by suicide, by accident in less than two days. I tell you, there has to be something wrong. . .'

`Is there anything specific . .' Boisseau began, but he got no further.

`Pardon, Mr Director-General, but I have not finished. A woman who knows—knew—Robert Philip well, drove past his villa yesterday morning and saw a blue Citroén parked opposite his villa. Two men were trying to repair the car, but she thought they were watching Philip's villa. She reported it to me when she saw the patrol-cars outside this morning, assuming there had been yet another burglary. . .

`Any registration number ?' Boisseau managed to interject.

`Unfortunately, no, but I have not finished,' Dorre continued. 'It occurred to me to check with all the local hotels and we find that two men arrived at the hotel nearest the station at 9.30 on Saturday night. The hotel, incidentally, is no more than a few metres away from the villa of the late Robert Philip. They arrived in a blue Citroén and we have the registration number. It is being circulated at this moment. Also, the descriptions of the two men. There may be no connection but I do not like this death at all, despite its technical perfection. . .'

`If it were not an accident then,' Boisseau hazarded, 'it would have to be the work of highly-skilled professionals ?'

`They would have to be trained assassins,' Dorre said bluntly, `because if I am right—and I do not say I am—then presumably Leon Jouvel's death was also arranged, and again there was technical perfection. You must not think I am a romantic,' he insisted, 'trying to turn every event into a crime, but I repeat, two men under surveillance dying so quickly does not smell of roses to me, sir. And,' he went on, once again preventing Boisseau from speaking, 'the geography is interesting, is it not?'

`The geography ?'

`It is not so very far to drive from Strasbourg to Colmar. I will let you know as soon as we get information on the car registration of the Citroen. . .'

Vanek, driving at speed, but always keeping just inside the legal limit, reached the Boulevard de Nancy in Strasbourg by nine in the morning, one hour before Inspector Dorre had circulated the car registration number. Handing back the Citroen to the Hertz agent, he walked out again and went into the restaurant where he had dropped Brunner and Lansky while he got rid of the vehicle.

`We've used that car quite long enough,' he told the two men, 'and two visits is more than enough by the same mode of transport.'

Refusing to allow them to finish their drinks, he took them outside where they again separated. With Brunner he took a cab to Strasbourg station, leaving Lansky to follow in a second vehicle. They joined forces again at the station but they each bought their tickets separately. Boarding the train by himself while the other two men went into a different coach, Lansky put his bag on the rack and lit a cigarette. Within fifteen minutes the train had crossed the Rhine bridge and was stopping in Kehl.

The Soviet Commando had arrived in Germany.

CHAPTER FOUR

M ON DAY was a bad day for Lennox, who never forgot that he was travelling with forged papers. Arriving back at Strasbourg station, intending to collect his suitcase from the baggage store and then take another train across the Rhine into Germany, he immediately noticed signs of intense police activity. There was a uniformed policeman on the platform as he alighted from the train, a young and alert man who was obviously scrutinizing all passengers as they walked past him to descend the exit steps.

In the main hall there were more police—some of them Lennox felt sure in plain clothes—and when he approached the luggage store two gendarmes stood by the counter, checking people's papers as they withdrew their luggage. Lennox walked away from the store and went inside the glassed-in café which fronted on the Place de la Gare. Sitting down at a table he ordered coffee, quite unaware that he was in the same cafe Lansky had waited in the previous Saturday evening before paying his final call on Leon Jouvel. While he drank his coffee Lennox watched the station and what he saw was not encouraging.

Another police van arrived, disgorging a dozen more policemen who ran inside the main hall. The energetic Inspector Dorre of Colmar had been in touch with his Strasbourg colleagues—Vanek's Citroen had now been traced to the Hertz car-hire branch in the Boulevard de Nancy—and Inspector Rochat's superiors, nervous now of a monumental blunder, co-operated fully. The abandonment of the car logically led them to the assumption that the recent hirers must now be travelling by train or air. A massive surveillance operation was put into action at the railway station and near-by airport. Ironically, the dragnet thrown out to trap the Soviet Commando was endangering Lennox.

It is one thing to slip across a border with false papers; it is quite a different kettle of fish to risk being checked carefully when an emergency dragnet is under way. Lennox paid for his coffee, walked across the Place de la Gare to the bus station, and jumped on the first crowded bus leaving. It happened to be going to Haguenau, a place he had never heard of, so he bought a ticket which would take him the whole route. The earliest he could risk crossing over into Germany would be the following day; dragnets are at their most vigilant during the first twenty-four hours. And the big problem would be where to spend the night: when the police are really looking for someone they check every hotel, even phoning those outlying places they cannot easily reach.

Lennox caught a late evening bus back from Haguenau to Strasbourg, and the first thing he noticed when he alighted at the Place de la Gare was the line of police vans drawn up outside the station. Early that morning, reading through the newspaper to find the report on Leon Jouvel's death, he had noticed a reference to an all-night session of the European Parliament being held in the city. After eating dinner in a back street restaurant, he took a cab to the Parliament building. His papers, which showed him as a reporter, readily gave him admittance and once inside he settled down in the press gallery to his own all-night session.

Before taking the cab to the European Parliament he had slipped into a hotel washroom where he had shaved with equipment he had bought in Haguenau; it might not have been wise to present an unshaven appearance inside the august precincts of Europe's talking shop. The precaution turned out to be unnecessary—there were few other reporters in the press gallery and at times, as the dreary debate droned on and on, Lennox was able to snatch an hour or so of sleep. Checking his watch at frequent intervals, he waited while the night passed on leaden feet. In the morning he would try once again to cross the Rhine into the Federal Republic of Germany.

It was Inspector Jacques Dorre (who in later years rose to the rank of Commissioner), who finally alerted Marc Grelle. When the prefect received Boisseau's report of his conversation with Colmar he personally phoned Dorre, who now had more information. He was able to tell Grelle that the Citroen which had transported two men to the hotel in Colmar had been handed in to the Hertz branch in the Boulevard de Nancy, Strasbourg.

`Yes,' he further confirmed, 'the description of the man who returned the car corresponds with the description of one of the two men who stayed at the Hotel Bristol on the nights of 18 and 19 December—and on the 19th Robert Philip died in his bath. . .

`If these two men—Jouvel and Philip—were murdered,' Grelle suggested to Dorre, 'it has to be the work of a professional assassin then? No amateur could fake both deaths so convincingly, you agree?'

`I agree,' Dorre replied crisply. 'But it appears there is a team of at least two assassins on the move—maybe even three men. . .

Grelle took a tighter grip on the phone. 'How do you make that out ?' he demanded.

`I personally checked the register at the Bristol. Ten minutes after the first two men—Duval and Bonnard—booked in, a third man, Lambert, took a room also. There is nothing to link these three men together—except that they all arrived on the night of the 18th and departed on the morning of the l0th, which is early today, of course. The point is, at this time of the year the hotel was almost empty. . .

Grelle thanked him for his co-operation and put down the receiver. 'There could be some kind of assassination team on the move in Alsace,' he told Boisseau. 'It's all theory, but if it were true who the hell could they be ?'

`Only Lasalle and the Englishman, Lennox, have that list, presumably,' Boisseau pointed out. 'Surely Lasalle is not wiping out his own witnesses ? That doesn't make any sense at all. The only thing which would make sense is if someone employed by the Leopard were doing the job. . .

`But the Leopard can't have the list. . .'

Grelle stopped and the two men stared at each other in silence. An hour later the indefatigable Dorre was back on the line again. He was working in close touch with his colleagues in Strasbourg, he explained, and at his suggestion Rochat had started contacting every hotel in the city. The names Duval, Bonnard and Lambert had soon been tracked down. The first two had spent the night of Friday, 17 December, at the Hotel Sofitel, while Lambert had slept at the Terminus, and it was during the evening of 18 December that Leon Jouvel had hanged himself.

`So,' Dorre pointed out, 'these same three men—and again the descriptions, though vague, tally—then moved down here to Colmar late on the evening of the 18th and were in the town when Robert Philip died. How far do you stretch the long arm of coincidence without breaking it ?'

`That's it!' Grelle snapped. 'When your descriptions of these three men arrive I'll circulate them throughout the whole of France—and we have their names. I want that trio detained and questioned the moment they surface again. . .'

On the night of 20 December it was dark by six o'clock in the Freiburg area as Dieter Wohl stood looking out between the curtains of his unlit bedroom. Wohl felt quite at home in the dark, possibly a relic of his wartime years when he had so often observed a suspect house from behind an unlit window. Wohl was not a nervous man, even though he lived alone in his two-storey house perched by itself at the roadside three kilometres outside Freiburg, but at the moment he was puzzled Why had a car stopped just short of his house and stayed there at this hour?

Overnight there had been a weather change; the snow had melted, the temperature had risen, and now the sky was broken cloud with moonlight shining through, illuminating the lonely country road and the trees in the fields beyond. Most people would not have heard the car, but ex-policeman Wohl—he had joined the force after the war—had the ears of a cat. A black Mercedes SL 230, he noted by the light of the moon. One shadowy figure sat behind the wheel while his two passengers had got out and were pretending to examine the motor. Why did the word 'pretending' leap into his head? Because although they had the bonnet up they kept glancing at his house and looking all round them as though spying out the land. Their glances were fleeting—so fleeting that probably only a trained observer like Wohl would have noticed them.

`My imagination is running away with me,' he murmured.

Below him in the road one of the men left the car and made his way into a field alongside the house, his hand at his flies.

He's just gone for a pee, Wohl decided. Leaving the front bedroom, still moving around in the dark, he went into the side bedroom where the curtains had not been drawn; keeping to the back of the room, he watched the man perform against a hedge. It was all perfectly innocent, except that the man relieving himself kept glancing at the back garden and up at the side of the house. Well hidden in the shadows, Wohl waited until the man had finished and returned to the car. A moment later the two men closed the hood as Wohl watched from the front bedroom, climbed back inside the Mercedes and the driver tried the engine. It sparked first time and drove off towards Freiburg. I must be getting old, Wohl thought, seeing sinister things where none exist. He went downstairs to continue work on his memoirs. Half an hour later the phone rang.