Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (7 page)

Before Spilsbury, forensic pathology was widely discredited, regarded as scientifically and medically dubious. However, by 1943, he had helped to transform the study of dead bodies—the “beastly science,” as it was known—into a branch of science both ghoulish and glamorous. Simultaneously, he acquired a reputation for experimenting on himself. Spilsbury inhaled carbon monoxide to test its effect on the body and made notes on his sensations (which were unpleasant). He climbed down a manhole in Redcross Street to check on gas that had killed a workman. When he accidentally swallowed meningitis germs in a hospital laboratory, he “just carried on.”
¹⁶
It was rumored that Sir Bernard could identify the cause of death simply by smelling a corpse. In 1938, the
Washington Post
hailed him as “England’s modern Sherlock Holmes.”
¹⁷

But a lifetime of inhaling death, peering into cadavers, and familiarity with the darkest sides of human nature had affected the great scientist. Media attention had gone to his head. Sir Bernard was aloof, arrogant, and utterly convinced of his own infallibility. He saw the world bleakly, through a veil of cynicism and self-satisfaction, and seldom evinced a shred of sympathy for anyone, living or dead. With heavy-lidded eyes and a “haughty, aristocratic bearing,”
¹⁸
he looked like a lizard in a lab coat, and smelled permanently of formaldehyde.

Ewen Montagu arranged to meet the famous pathologist over a glass of lukewarm sherry at Spilsbury’s club, the Junior Carlton, in Pall Mall. Spilsbury had already done macabre service for British intelligence. Captured enemy spies were offered a stark choice: either work as double agents or face execution. Most agreed to cooperate, but a few resisted or were deemed unusable. These, the “unlucky sixteen”
¹⁹
as they became known, were tried and executed. Spilsbury was brought in to carry out autopsies on these executed spies, including Josef Jakobs, shot by firing squad in the summer of 1941, the last person to be executed in the Tower of London.

Sir Bernard was sixty-six but looked far older. Montagu was not in the habit of subservience, but he had seen Spilsbury perform in court and was deeply in awe of “that extraordinary man.”
²⁰
Conscious of how odd the words sounded, the younger man explained that the navy “wanted the Germans and Spaniards
²¹
to accept a floating body as that of a victim of an aircraft disaster.” What manner of death would fit in with the impression the government wished to give? Spilsbury’s heavy lids did not even blink at the question. Indeed, as Montagu later recorded, “never once did he ask why
²²
I wanted to know, or what I was proposing to do.”

There was a long pause while the forensic scientist considered the question and sipped his sherry. Finally, in his courtroom voice, “clear, resonant, without any trace
²³
of uncertainty,” he presented his verdict. The easiest way, of course, would be to find a drowned man and float him ashore in a life jacket. But failing that, any number of other causes of death would do, for the victims of air accidents at sea, Spilsbury explained, do not necessarily die from traumatic injury or drowning: “Many die from exposure,
²⁴
or even from shock.”

Spilsbury returned to his laboratory at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and Montagu reported back to Cholmondeley that the hunt for a suitable corpse might be easier than they had anticipated. Even so, it was hardly possible to ask around for a dead body, as gossip would undoubtedly spread and embarrassing questions would ensue. Briefly they considered whether grave robbery might be the answer, “doing a Burke and Hare,”
²⁵
but that idea was swiftly scotched. In 1827, William Burke and William Hare stole the body of an army pensioner from its coffin and sold it to the Edinburgh Medical College for seven pounds. They went on to murder sixteen people, selling their bodies for medical dissection. Hare testified against Burke, who was hanged and publicly dissected. This was not a happy comparison. Stealing corpses was unpleasant, immoral, and illegal, and even if they were successful, a body that had lain in earth for only a few days would be too decomposed for use. What was needed was a discreet and helpful individual with legal access to plenty of fresh corpses.

Montagu knew just such a man: the coroner of St. Pancras in northwest London, who went by the delightfully Dickensian name of Bentley Purchase.

U
NDER
E
NGLISH LAW
, the coroner, a post dating back to the eleventh century, is the government official responsible for investigating deaths, particularly those that occur under unusual circumstances, and determining their causes. When a death is unexpected, violent, or unnatural, the coroner is responsible for deciding whether to hold a postmortem and, if necessary, an inquest.

Bentley Purchase was a friend and colleague of Spilsbury in the death business, but Purchase was as cheery as Sir Bernard was grim. Indeed, for a man who spent his life with the dead, the coroner was the life and soul of every occasion. He found death not only fascinating but extremely funny, which, of course, it is. No form of violent or mysterious mortality surprised or upset him. “A depressing job?”
²⁶
he once said. “Far from it. I can’t imagine it getting me down.” He would offer slightly damp chocolates to guests in his private chambers and joke: “They were found in Auntie’s bag
²⁷
when she was fished out of the Round Pond at Hampstead last night.” A farmer by birth, Purchase was “rugged in appearance and character,”
²⁸
with “an impish sense of humour”
²⁹
and a finely calibrated sense of the ridiculous: he loved Gilbert and Sullivan operas, toy trains, boiled eggs, and his model piggery in Ipswich. He never wore a hat and laughed loudly and often.

Montagu knew Purchase as “an old friend from my barrister days”
³⁰
and dropped him a note asking if they might meet to discuss a confidential matter. Purchase replied with directions to the St. Pancras Coroner’s Court and a typically jovial postscript: “An alternative means of getting
³¹
here is, of course, to get run over.”

Purchase had fought in the First World War as a doctor attached to the field artillery, winning the Military Cross for “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty”
³²
and fighting on until 1918, when a shell splinter removed most of his left hand. By the time war broke out again, he was nearly fifty, too old to wear a uniform but “aching to get into the war.”
³³
Indeed, he had already demonstrated a willingness to help the intelligence services and, if necessary, “distort the truth in the service of security.”
³⁴
When an Abwehr spy named William Rolph killed himself by putting his head in a gas oven in 1940, Purchase obliged with a verdict of “heart attack.” In the same month that he received Montagu’s note, Purchase had been called in to deliberate on the case of Paul Manoel, an agent of the Free French Intelligence Service who had been found hanging in a London basement following interrogation as a suspected enemy agent. Purchase’s inquest was “cursory in the extreme.”
³⁵

The coroner was initially dubious when Montagu explained that he needed to find a male corpse for “a warlike operation”
³⁶
but “did not wish to disclose why a body
³⁷
was needed.”

“You can’t get bodies just
³⁸
for the asking, you know,” Purchase told him, grinning. “I should think bodies are the only commodities not in short supply at the moment [but] even with bodies all over the place, each one has to be accounted for.”

Montagu would say only that the scheme required a fresh cadaver that might appear to have drowned or died in an air accident. The matter, he added gravely, was “of national importance.”
³⁹

Still Purchase hesitated, pointing out that if word got out that the legal system for disposing of the dead was being circumvented, “public confidence in coroners
⁴⁰
of the country would be shaken.”

“At what level has this scheme
⁴¹
been given approval?” the coroner asked.

Montagu paused before replying, not entirely truthfully: “The prime minister’s.”
⁴²

That was enough for Bentley Purchase, whose “well developed sense of comedy”
⁴³
was now thoroughly aroused. Chortling, he explained that, as a coroner, he had “absolute discretion”
⁴⁴
over the paperwork and that in certain circumstances a death could be concealed, and a body obtained, without getting official permission from anyone. “A coroner,”
⁴⁵
he explained, “could, in fact, always get rid of a corpse by a certificate that it was going to be buried outside the country—it would then be assumed that a relative was taking it home (i.e. to Ireland) for burial and the coroner could then do what he liked with it without let, hindrance or trace.” Bodies were pouring into London morgues at an unprecedented rate: in the previous year Purchase had dealt with 1,855 cases and held inquests into 726 sudden deaths. Many of the bodies “remained unidentified
⁴⁶
and were in the end buried as unknowns.” One of these would surely fit the bill. The St. Pancras mortuary was attached to the coroner’s court, so Purchase offered to give Montagu a tour of the bodies currently in cold storage. “After one or two possible corpses
⁴⁷
had been inspected and for various reasons rejected,” the two men shook hands and parted, with Purchase promising to keep a lookout for a suitable candidate.

The St. Pancras mortuary was without doubt the most unpleasant place Montagu had ever been; but then, his had been a life almost entirely free of unpleasant places and upsetting sights.

Ewen bemoaned “the inevitable misery of separation”
⁴⁸
from his family. His letters to Iris are filled with longing and loneliness. “I miss you most frightfully,”
⁴⁹
one letter reads, “and life has just seemed one long, gray monotone since we have been separated.” But he had grown to enjoy his existence as a bachelor spy. “The interest and pressure of my work
⁵⁰
managed to keep my morale up,” he wrote. “In a way it was like a mixture of constructing a crossword puzzle and sawing a jigsaw puzzle and then waiting to see whether the recipient could and would solve the clues and place the bits together successfully.” The only drawback to living at Kensington Court was the presence of Lady Swaythling, with whom he argued constantly. He found time to get away for fishing trips to Exmoor. “It was lovely
⁵¹
to be far from the noise and the worry and just listening to the noise of the stream,” he told Iris. “I haven’t enjoyed anything as much since you left.” He relished the fishing most when it was hardest: “The greatest fun
⁵²
is the very delicate casting into awkward places.”

Lord Swaythling had taken the Rolls Royce with him to Townhill, so Montagu borrowed a bicycle to commute to work. In order to transport “super-secret papers,”
⁵³
he bolted a large pannier on the front, to which he chained his briefcase. The head of security at the Naval Intelligence Department questioned whether it was safe to cycle around with a briefcase full of secrets. What if the case was stolen? But after some argument, Montagu was given formal permission to continue with this unorthodox arrangement for transporting documents “as long as I always wore
⁵⁴
a shoulder holster and an automatic pistol.”

On January 24, 1943, Montagu cycled back as usual to Kensington Court, where the massive front door was opened by Ward, the butler. Nancy, “one of the best cooks in London,”
⁵⁵
had rustled up a fine dinner in spite of rationing, although Lady Swaythling insisted that standards had slipped. “Mother is too awful
⁵⁶
for words,” Ewen wrote to Iris. “She complains that she can’t get her nice chocolates ‘of decent quality’ whereas everyone else is overjoyed at getting any at all.” Ewen ate alone in the dining room paneled in oak from the Place Vendôme, beneath the glowering portraits of his ancestors. There was always plenty of cheese. He then spent an hour in the great library, working on the “crossword puzzles”
⁵⁷
in his briefcase. The Casablanca Conference had ended with the decision to invade Sicily. Cholmondeley’s plan to foist a dead body on the Germans with false documents was still only on the drawing board, but the decision at Casablanca had sharply accelerated the timetable: unless Montagu found a suitable body, and fast, Trojan Horse would be, in a manner of speaking, dead in the water.