Ian Fleming by Harling Robert

Author:Harling, Robert. [Robert Harling]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849549912
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2015-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

FLEMING GOES SOLO

Two days after our return from Norway, Fleming returned from his own expedition into what he termed the Fenimore Cooper never-never land of Europe, traversed mainly, but occasionally, by the more imaginative members of 30AU. I learned the background to the story in due course.

Halfway through April, Lieutenant Glanville RNVR and his party had been investigating a school building in the small town of Naumburg in eastern Germany. The building had housed a branch of German naval intelligence but had recently been abandoned. One of Glanville’s party had come across a charred piece of paper carrying an address: SKI/KA, Tambach. Nobody in the party had an inkling of the meaning of the initials, but the paper referred to the despatch of classified documents to that address. Glanville, a persistently probing officer, had decided that the information might prove of some significance and set out to see whether this seeming logogram could be defined. He thus became involved in one of those searches which more dedicated investigators of seeming mysteries so thoroughly enjoy. Few men were better equipped by taste, temperament and training to take on the role of a wartime Sherlock Holmes than this officer. The ensuing search took a week, but by late April he had arrived at the Schloss Tambach.

News of what might prove to be historic material but scarcely current grade-one Second War material was signalled to the DNI. The schloss might possess potentially valuable papers, especially as the outfit was under the care and protection of a retired admiral. With other investigations on hand, Glanville needed to press on, having arranged with 3rd Army HQ for a military guard to be laid on for the schloss and to await the DNI’s instructions.

Room 39 had heard vague reports of the collection: lorry-loads of documents had been reported arriving at Tambach for several months. The general assumption had been that these were records relating to the current war and might be of considerable value. Other suggestions were that these were merely archival records. Fleming decided that losing valuable archives of any war could prove a grievous loss to future marine scholarship. Such a possible loss would prompt interest for any book collector of ambition and scope. On either score – modern or antique archives – the schloss was certainly worth a visit. Preliminary enquiries disclosed that Tambach-Dietharz or Tambach, as the remote outpost was more generally known, was situated a few miles south of Gotha on the E40 route, north of Thuringer Walk and almost 150 miles south of Hannover.

In the course of our first lunch for a couple of weeks, Fleming readily admitted that his book collector’s instincts had been aroused by the thought of such a killing. He had arranged for himself to be directed by the DNI to visit the schloss. For so chair-bound an officer, such an excursion promised to be an unusual tail-end bonus to his personal war. He had thereupon taken off with a bookish and scholarly RNVR officer to view the hoped-for treasure trove.

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