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Lunding was jealous because he had begun to realize that Emmy was in love with me, a much younger man, and he thought he was a hell of a big man with the women. He was attractive to women, but only because of his military position and standing. He was uneducated, but he could travel to Germany and Sweden to get black-market goods. No one would bother him at customs on the way back in because he was a big officer in Danish Intelligence. But the point is, Lunding wanted to fuck Birgit too. He was about the same size as Birgit, and he wanted to visit her in Germany and fuck her.

Personal issues aside, Sneum remained convinced that he had acted correctly by deterring the daughter of his landlady from embarking upon a career in espionage. Despite his romantic entanglement, he had tried to look at the proposal objectively, and on that basis he was sure that Birgit would eventually have been forced to betray them all. Furthermore, ‘Emmy was against Birgit going to Germany too,’ he said later.

As the project was aborted, the Princes wondered how they might gain control over Thomas Sneum, the maverick spy who seemed to be disrupting all of their best-laid plans.

Back in London, the Danish Section of the Special Operations Executive was extremely pleased with its latest recruitment coup. In Dr Carl Bruhn, they believed they had found the perfect man to lead their proposed new network in Denmark. All summer and autumn, blissfully unaware that MI6 was thinking along precisely the same lines but had worked more quickly, SOE had trained Bruhn and a radio operator called Mogens Hammer for a mission behind enemy lines in Denmark.

The London-based chief of the Danish Section, Commander Ralph Hollingworth, was delighted with the project. Later he would gush:

Bruhn was the best man we ever had in the SOE, full of energy, with a talent for organization, winning the respect and devotion of all his comrades and exercising great influence upon all who worked with him. His determination may be judged from the fact that he passed his final medical examinations when already training for parachute jumping at Ringway. Indeed his very last exam he passed with distinction only a week before we sent him to Denmark.

By then, however, it was December 1941, and Tommy Sneum had been operating in Denmark for three months. It was highly unlikely that Bruhn would do anything that Tommy hadn’t done already, but to the men who mattered in London that wasn’t the point. In the corridors of power, the battle for control of Denmark raged on. And, in spite of Ronnie Turnbull’s best efforts to convince them otherwise, the SOE hierarchy believed that the best way to win that battle was by putting their own men in the field. They were determined to prove that anything the SIS ‘professionals’ could do, they could do better. For their part, MI6’s spymasters were at pains to resist all interference from men they regarded as upstart amateurs.

Chapter 27

CHRISTMAS HORRORS

TOMMY DECIDED IT WOULD BE unacceptable to go down to Christmas lunch at 15 St. Annaegade without flowers for Emmy and Birgit’s table, so on Christmas Eve he left the building in disguise, wearing a pair of spectacles and a false moustache. He found a florist’s and was paying for an enormous bunch of red roses when he suddenly became aware of a woman staring at him. To his horror, he noticed out of the corner of his eye the wife of an old Fleet Air Arm colleague. He recalled that her family was pro-German, and therefore probably had contacts among the collaborationist elements of the Danish police. The woman was obviously wondering whether this could really be Thomas Sneum, and seemed ready to engage him in conversation in order to find out. His attempted escape by Hornet Moth that summer had become common knowledge among those who had known him, with many convinced that he had met his end in the North Sea. Now the woman might be thinking not only that he had survived against the odds, but that he had returned on some sort