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so much pain. The colonel had become a father figure during the tense days before the mission, for instance when he had shown Sneum some of the basic tricks of motor-racing in his powerful Bentley. He was charismatic and good fun. However, in Tommy’s view, he had made two fundamental errors of judgement at the planning stage: he had selected Christophersen for the mission and he had seen fit to equip his two-man team with a primitive radio.

As he prepared what he wanted to say, Sneum was curious to see Londoners going about their daily business, surrounded by the ruins of buildings destroyed in the Blitz. Nothing seemed to dampen the spirits of these people, who had been bombed but never occupied. Yet Tommy himself became alarmed when he noticed that the police car seemed to have bypassed St. James’s and was heading towards one of the bridges over the Thames.

There was a very good reason why Rabagliati’s office would not be the first port of call. For the head of SIS’s A2 (Danish and Dutch) Section was now too busy trying to save his own skin to devote much time to Sneum. Rabagliati was already falling foul of political games among the Free Dutch, because he had declared allegiance to one of that community’s more controversial figures. Until that summer, the SIS hierarchy had been fairly loosely defined below ‘C’ (the chief, Stewart Menzies), ‘ACSS’ (the assistant chief, Claude Dansey), and the chief of staff, Commander Rex Howard, who ran day-to-day business at Secret Service Headquarters at 54 Broadway. Heads of section were generally considered of equal importance to one another, and with no clear order of seniority these men sometimes competed for resources and respect. Rabagliati, though, with his fine military record and aristocratic breeding, considered himself to be superior to an equally haughty Jewish colleague—Commander Kenneth Cohen. However, the latter was a key player, since he had taken charge of the allimportant French Section.

A personality clash erupted when the undeniably snobbish Rabagliati refused to recognize the seniority of Cohen, who had just been promoted to statutory head of A Section. Effectively, the commander had been handed executive responsibility for France, Holland, Denmark and indeed the rest of occupied Western Europe. Rabagliati went over his rival’s head to complain about the promotion, and even threatened to resign in protest. To his astonishment, he was promptly asked to make his offer of resignation formal. His bluff had backfired disastrously. It seems incredible that a fit of pique, based certainly on snobbery and perhaps on anti-Semitism, could effectively have removed Sneum’s spymaster from the arena just when Tommy needed him most.

As the police car carrying the three Danes crossed the Thames and moved purposefully through Clapham, Tommy began to wonder if something had gone wrong. Then he remembered that the Royal Patriotic School, where he had been vetted following the Hornet Moth flight, was near by. Perhaps he would face another interrogation there. Disturbingly, however, the car took them even further south, far beyond the school’s location. It soon reached Brixton, where the driver turned off the main road and down a side street. Sneum saw vast walls rising above the houses and the daunting arch of an iron gate. Before he knew it, Brixton Prison had swallowed the police vehicle, and Tommy found himself incarcerated yet again.

Chapter 40

THE ORDEAL

TOMMY SNEUM DEMANDED to see Brixton Prison’s governor. His request was refused. Instead he was again separated from Helvard and Christophersen and thrown into a small cell in the bowels of the jail. He tried to ignore the familiar stale smell. It was best to be positive and patient while he waited for Rabagliati to arrive. Though his cell was no more than four meters long and two meters wide, even more cramped than his home of the last couple of months in Malmo, he tried to see the funny side. This wasn’t the best of British welcomes, but what did it matter? He wouldn’t be staying inside for long.

When the door