Colin Forbes - The Stone leopard

`Thank you,' he said and went out into the courtyard and up the seven steps which led to the plate glass doors of the main entrance.

Not even a cabinet minister could have called as casually as this, but Marc Grelle was held in especially high regard by Guy Florian. 'He has no political ambition,' the president once informed a cabinet minister he knew to be excessively ambitious. 'I had to drag him away from Marseilles to Paris. Sometimes I think he is the only honest man in France. I would trust him with my life…

In fact, Guy Florian had entrusted Grelle with his life. While the president is inside the department of Paris the responsibility for his security-and that of cabinet ministers-is in the hands of the police prefect. On the morning after the assassination attempt Florian had ordered that from now on his personal safety was to be in the hands of Marc Grelle throughout the whole of France. With one stroke of his pen Florian had made the prefect the most powerful figure in the French Republic after himself-if he chose to exercise that power.

`The president will receive you,' a uniformed usher informed Grelle as he waited in the marble-floored lobby which is carpeted only down the centre. The interview took place in the president's study on the first floor at the rear of the Elysee, a room with tall windows which overlooks the walled garden laid out with lawns and gravel paths. Facing the president as he sits at his Louis XV desk is a Gobelin wall tapestry of 'Don Quixote Cured of his Madness by Wisdom', and there are two telephones on the desk, one black and one white. A third instrument stands on a side table close to his right hand. As the door was closing behind Grelle he heard the chiming of one of the hundred and thirty-seven clocks which furnish the Elysee. 11 am. A large Alsatian dog bounded across the room, reared up and dropped its forepaws on the prefect's shoulders.

`Kassim, get down, you brute,' Grelle growled affectionately. The prefect himself, who was fond of dogs, had personally found the animal when requested to do so by Florian soon after his election. It was said in the Elysee that only two people dared touch the animal: Grelle and the president himself. Removing the forepaws, the prefect bowed and then sat down opposite the most powerful statesman in western Europe. Typically, Florian waited for him to speak.

`I was very disturbed to see that you again walked back from the Place Beauvau on the evening of 9 December,' Grelle began. 'And only twenty-four hours after the appalling incident…'

Florian lowered his lean, intelligent head like a small boy caught in the farmer's apple orchard. It was the kind of gesture, coming from a president, which would have disarmed most men, but Grelle's expression remained grave. 'It will not happen again,' Florian assured him. 'You saw the pictures in Friday's papers, of course?'

`I was thunderstruck.'

`But you are no politician, my friend. The street was swarming with detectives-at a discreet distance so the photographers would not include them in the pictures! But it is good politics, you see-the president walks the streets again only one day after the incident!' Florian grinned impishly. 'It is all nonsense, of course. Tell me, am I forgiven?'

Grelle returned to the prefecture reassured that from now on the president would stay behind the security fence erected to guard him. Only one question remained: was the security fence foolproof?

`Come in, close the door and lock it,' Grelle told Boisseau as he settled himself on the edge of his desk. It was a habit of the prefect's when disturbed to perch his buttocks on the edge of a desk or table so he could start pacing about more easily if the inclination took him. Boisseau sat in a chair, took out his pipe and relaxed, waiting. With less nervous energy than his chief, he had the look of a patient squirrel, and behind his back that, in fact, was what his staff called him. Andre the Squirrel.

`I checked the visitors' register at the Elysee for the evening of 9 December for the hour 7.30 to 8.30,' Grelle said abruptly. `Before I go on, remember that the only physical description we have of the Leopard concerns his height-over six feet tall…

`You have found something?' Boisseau suggested.

`Someone-more than one, as it happens. Florian himself arrived back on foot at eight o'clock from the Place Beauvau-that won't happen again, incidentally. The interesting thing is three other ministers also arrived on foot-they had come from the meeting at the Ministry of the Interior…'

The two men exchanged cynical smiles. Normally everyone would have returned from the Place Beauvau in his own ministerial car, but because the president had walked back they had felt obliged to adopt the same form of locomotion. `And, of course, they hoped to get their own pictures in the papers,' Grelle observed, 'knowing there were photographers in the Place Beauvau.'

`Who else came back?' Boisseau asked quietly.

`Pierre Rouget for one-we can dismiss him, of course.' They smiled again. Rouget was the nominal prime minister, the man the reporters called 'Florian's poodle'. An amiable man-`with a backbone of rubber' as Grelle sometimes remarked-no one took much notice of him and it was rumoured he would soon be replaced. In any case, he was no taller than five feet eight. `Between 8.15 and 8.30,' Grelle continued, 'two other men arrived and walked into the Elysee-and they came back separately, a few minutes apart. One of them was my own boss, the Minister of the Interior, Roger Danchin. The other was the Minister of National Defence, Alain Blanc. Both of them as you know are the tallest men in the cabinet, both of them are over six feet tall…

Boisseau took the dead pipe out of his mouth and stared at the prefect. 'You don't really believe this? Danchin, Blanc- the two strong men in the government? Martin must have been having hallucinations.'

`I don't really believe anything,' Grelle replied coolly. 'All I do is to check the facts and see where they lead-as we do in any investigation. But as we have agreed, I'm telling you everything however absurd it may seem.'

`Absurd? It's unbelievable…

`Of course.' Grelle picked up a report off his desk, talking as he scanned the first page. 'Something else has happened. David Nash, the American, has just been spotted arriving at Roissy airport this morning by a Surete man. And I have received a pressing invitation to a reception at the American Embassy this evening. You believe in coincidence, Boisseau?'

Andre the Squirrel did not reply. He was gazing into the distance, as though trying to grasp a fact so great it was beyond his comprehension.

`Danchin or Blanc?' he murmured.

It had been Roger Danchin's aim to become Minister of the Interior since he had been a youth, spending endless hours over his studies at the Ecole Normale d'Administration, the special school founded by de Gaulle himself to train future leaders of the French Republic. And while Guy Florian and Alain Blanc-at the Ecole Polytechnique-were the hares who forged ahead because of their brilliance, Danchin was the tortoise who got there in the end because he never stopped trying. Sometimes it is the tortoise which outlasts the hares.

By the time he was offered the post of Minister of the Interior, Roger Danchin, an intelligence expert, probably knew more about the French security system than any other man alive. Like Alain Blanc, over six feet tall, he had developed the stoop which tall men sometimes affect. Fifty-two years old, he was thin and bony-faced, a man with a passion for secrecy and a man who loved power. Blanc, who disliked him, summed up Danchin in a typical, biting anecdote. `Danchin would interrogate his own grandmother if he suspected she had changed her will-and after three hours under the arc lights she would leave him all the money… Danchin was at the height of his power when he summoned Grelle to see him just after the prefect returned from checking the Elysee register.