‘I think Prince is wasted in the police. He ought to be working for us.’

‘Shaw looks after recruitment: have a word with him.’ Gilbey opened the folder again and picked up his spectacles, a sign the meeting was over. Hendrie coughed. He was determined not to waste this opportunity.

‘Denmark’s one of your responsibilities, isn’t it, sir?’

Gilbey nodded. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I hope I’m not speaking out of turn, but I understand it may be proving troublesome.’

Gilbey looked slightly surprised at the impertinence of Hendrie’s question, but only fleetingly. When he spoke, he sounded pleased to be getting the matter off his chest. ‘It’s the bane of my life, if the truth be told. We always thought Norway would be the difficult one in that part of the world, but Denmark is indeed proving most troublesome.’

He hesitated, unsure whether to carry on. ‘Look, erm… all this is confidential, Hendrie, even inside this building – you understand that, eh?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘For one thing, the Danes can’t even make up their minds whether they’re actually occupied by the Germans in the same way most of the rest of Europe is. And then they think they can handle everything themselves; they seem reluctant for us to help. The SOE are more involved there than we are, but that’s the problem: a fundamental failure to distinguish between resistance and intelligence. The Danes seem to think they’re one and the same. Their idea of intelligence is to see it as an extension of sabotage. It doesn’t feel safe sending people out there at the moment: too many of the SOE chaps we’ve dropped there have been captured more or less straight away. May be just sheer bad luck, I don’t know… but having said that, it is essential I have my own intelligence operation in Denmark. Essential!’ He banged his desk with his fist. ‘I simply can’t get people to take Denmark seriously, Hendrie. Mention the place around here or in Whitehall and it’s dismissed as some quaint backwater where they’re all terribly decent sorts who produce butter and bacon and we really don’t need to worry about it. But we do, we most certainly do! And do you know why?’

Hendrie shook his head and was about to hazard a guess when Gilbey replied to his own question, sounding quite angry as he did so.

‘I shall tell you why: because Denmark is of considerable strategic importance. For a start, it shares a bloody land border with Germany, and more importantly, not far from that border is where we think the Germans are producing some of their so-called secret weapons, the ones Hitler is supposed to have up his sleeve and which will win the war for him. Are you aware of these, Hendrie?’

‘One hears rumours, sir.’