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And, despite his hatred for Christophersen, Tommy did occasionally acknowledge his fellow agent’s achievement in surviving the trek: ‘I don’t think he was a courageous man in general, but I suppose he had tried to do more than the average Dane, and he did show enough courage to walk over the ice from Denmark to Sweden.’

Historical records related to this extraordinary march over the sea include Christophersen’s subsequent police interviews, von Bahr’s aerial photographs, and police reports written after Oxlund’s body was recovered. Only Sigfred knew the full story, though; including whether he made a conscious decision to leave behind Kaj and Thorbjoern. Since confusion is a common symptom of hypothermia, and Sigfred’s survival instinct was all he had to counteract his exhaustion and the intense cold, any condemnation of his conduct seems harsh. Yet it is easy to understand Tommy’s anguish: from his point of view, that bid for freedom couldn’t have gone worse. He lost a good friend, and the last person he wanted to survive was Sigfred, a man he had plotted to kill on several occasions.

Amazingly, Christophersen sustained no permanent physical damage from his battle with the elements. He had covered twenty-five kilometers on ice, on top of a gruelling five-kilometer snow-trek to reach the Danish coast in the first place, while pulling a heavily laden sledge. But his achievement would not have given him any satisfaction.

The ice floe containing Thorbjoern’s body had melted before a recovery team could reach it, and his corpse was swept away by the Oeresund currents. It was discovered further down the coast many weeks later. The Danish authorities arrived in an ice-breaker to retrieve Kaj’s body at 8.23 a.m. on 7 March. Even though he had managed to cross the border into Sweden, the Danes argued that his body was their property because he had left their shores illegally. Poor Kaj had marched from Nazi-occupied Europe to the brink of freedom, only to be dragged lifeless back to Denmark by Hitler’s puppets. Still nestling snugly in his coat pocket was a pen inscribed ‘K. OXLUND.’ The fact that he had taken it along was an oversight which now threatened to have devastating consequences for Thomas Sneum.

Tommy’s brother-in-law Niels-Richard Bertelsen told him of Oxlund’s death. ‘I had a drink and thought of him and said, “Byebye, old boy,”’ Sneum recalled. Sadness and anger flowed through him in equal measure. With another swig of beer, he quietly cursed Sigfred Christophersen, and his stubborn ability to survive. ‘I should have killed him,’ he told himself, time and time again. Then he wondered what Christophersen might already have told the Swedes about their mission.

Considering the trauma he had suffered, Sigfred Christophersen was actually holding out rather well in Malmo. On 7 March 1942, he was interviewed by Kriminal-Kommissarie Runerheim, one of the names Sneum had memorized from Aage Park’s notebook. Runerheim had to begin by confirming what Sigfred already suspected—that his two accomplices were dead. While hiding his grief must have been hard, Sigfred strenuously denied that he was in any way related to Thorbjoern. Instead, he insisted that his name was Erik Moeller, and he gave a false address. A suspicious Runerheim warned that there was no point in lying, since they could check everything with the Danish People’s Register. Christophersen stuck to his story. Then he insisted that the third man was Kaj Andersen, a thirty-three-year-old lieutenant in the military. Runerheim immediately suspected the name to be a fabrication. He knew about the incriminating pen found in the dead man’s coat pocket, which strongly suggested that a Kaj Oxlund, not Kaj Andersen, had died on the ice. Still, he decided to check out every aspect of the stubborn survivor’s story, if only to dismantle it.

That same day in Denmark, the police endeavoured to trace the relations of a Kaj Oxlund, who was confirmed to have lived in Noekkerosevej. Oxlund’s parents, it emerged, were already dead; his wife, Tulle, was recovering from a bowel