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be able to form a squadron, and it seemed reasonable to ask him for some practical help. But when Tommy tracked down and called the representative, whose name was Thielst, he was distinctly unhelpful. Perhaps he feared his phone line had been tapped by the Nazis. At the end of an awkward conversation, giving the man the benefit of the doubt, Sneum decided to visit him at the de Havilland offices in the city center.
    Tommy arrived hoping that Thielst would prove more amenable in person. Unfortunately, the rep remained as evasive and suspicious as he had been on the phone. Tommy’s only success during another tense conversation was to steal a manual from one of the office desks. But his disappointment evaporated when he opened the manual and found inside a list of all the owners of de Havilland planes in Denmark. Now it was just a question of picking the name and address that were most likely to bear fruit. And for this task he decided that two heads were better than one.
    Tommy contacted an army pilot called Holger Petersen, an old friend, and they met up in Copenhagen to go through the manual together. They noticed that a Hornet Moth was registered to a lieutenant in the Army Reserve named Poul Andersen, who owned a dairy farm called Elseminde near Odense on the island of Fyn. Petersen—who was known simply as ‘H.P.’—thought he remembered something about the history of this plane. He was convinced that Elseminde had been used as a base by Sylvest Jensen, an aerial photographer who had made a fortune just before the war by snapping people’s houses and charging huge amounts for the souvenir pictures. He also believed there might be more than a Moth on the farm: crucially, there could be stockpiles of fuel, since Jensen had run several planes from Elseminde’s very basic airfield before the arrival of the Germans had brought an abrupt halt to his lucrative enterprise. Although H.P. wasn’t keen to fly to England himself, he seemed to share his friend’s excitement as the bare bones of an audacious plan began to form in their heads. And Tommy could hardly wait to follow up this new lead.
    First, however, he had to face new responsibilities, however temporarily. His daughter, Marianne Sneum, had arrived on 14 April. With a mixture of excitement and apprehension, Tommy visited his wife and child in hospital that evening. When he held the infant in his arms and saw the sheer pride on the face of his beaming, exhausted wife, he was surprised by a strange elation he hadn’t known before. But deep down he knew more than ever that the war would soon take him away from his new family. The spying, the adrenalin, the refusal to be bullied during the occupation, these were all factors which consumed him. And he felt no more ready for fatherhood than he had for marriage.
    By now, his relationship with Else was beyond repair. He had never been faithful to her, primarily because he liked other women too much—the excitement they bought and the independence they guaranteed. Trips around the country, picking up intelligence reports here and there, had afforded him many opportunities for casual conquests. The thrill that came with danger meant everything to him, though he was never stupid enough or sufficiently smitten to tell the girls his real name. And he was even able to justify his behavior by arguing that his infidelities helped his resistance missions: ‘Talking to the girls was a good way to get the true picture in an area, and to understand where local loyalties lay. And which was better, to stay in a private bedroom or in a hotel, where the Nazis might have a sympathizer working? I used to say I was on business and never let anyone too close. The women never suspected what I was really doing. I gave them other things to think about.’
    He always managed to remain detached from romantic and family complications. The desire to escape to Britain with his recently shot films dominated his feelings and thoughts. If that