The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [111]
Knowing what might be at stake, Odmar was soon conducting Christophersen’s interrogations personally. And Sigfred was almost as forthcoming as Tommy Sneum had feared. Perhaps he was still in shock after his ordeal, because once he had decided to admit that he had been sent from Britain, it would have been sensible to claim he was the sole survivor of the December drop that had killed Carl Bruhn. Christophersen admitted that he had read newspaper reports about that incident, so he knew it was in the minds of his interrogators. Had he used the story, he might have convinced the Danish police that there were no other British agents in the country. Instead, he revealed that he had parachuted into Denmark in September, and even added that he had not come alone. He also confessed that the objective of the mission had been to send intelligence back to Britain on a variety of subjects. Not content with admitting that he was a British spy, though, he revealed the amount of time he had spent in England training for the mission. Worse still, he told Odmar how many times a day he could transmit to Britain during peak periods of activity, and the precise frequency he used. It was only a small consolation that he had at least destroyed his codes before setting foot on the ice.
Together with these astonishing revelations about the mission came a detailed account of virtually his entire life story. Christophersen’s fear of Sneum—and the certain knowledge that the latter would kill him one day if his identity were betrayed—was probably all that kept him from giving away his partner’s name too.
Even so, the Danish police now had enough information to piece together the rest of the story. They discovered that Sigfred’s brother Thorbjoern had worked for Werner Gyberg, the man who set up Tommy Sneum’s first meeting with Duus Hansen. They promptly arrested Gyberg, which left Sneum and Duus Hansen one step from disaster, relying solely on the businessman’s defiance under interrogation. The only glimmer of hope lay in the fact that the Germans hadn’t yet joined in the questioning in a bid to break him.
But even with the Danish police running the show, the future looked grim. Though they knew nothing about Duus Hansen’s involvement, they had already put two and two together and realized that Christophersen’s fellow agent was Tommy Sneum. There had been the unconfirmed sighting in the florist’s near Emmy’s house, which had prompted the enquiry about Sneum from one of Bertelsen’s police colleagues. Then, in the aftermath of the tragedy on the ice, Oxlund’s neighbors, in particular his caretaker, had given the police detailed descriptions of Kaj’s associates. One such description bore an uncanny resemblance to Sneum, and the caretaker had confirmed that this man, ‘The Aviator’, had also been seen at Oxlund’s address prior to the occupation. It didn’t take much investigation to establish that Oxlund and Sneum had been longstanding friends. ‘The Aviator’ had been aptly nicknamed, for the Danish police began to realize that Sneum must have survived his flight in the Hornet Moth and reached England the previous summer. And now there was plenty of evidence to suggest that he had returned as a spy. Tommy had suddenly become the most wanted man in Denmark.
Fortunately for Sneum, though, he held one advantage over the police—some of their own detectives were on his side. Amazingly, the Copenhagen force had never made the connection between Niels-Richard Bertelsen