All four head for Innsbruck, and Mespelbrunn gives Richard the plans for the countermeasure. He is revealed as the missing scientist, Dr. Frances and Richard leave the house just in time, and Count Seidel arrives to help them free Mespelbrunn. Mespelbrunn tells them to run and that they are being hunted by the Gestapo. They hear thumping noises upstairs and discover that von Aschenhausen is holding Mespelbrunn prisoner.
But when von Aschenhausen fails to respond to a code signal that Richard gives him, the couple become suspicious. They notice sheet music for "My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose" on the piano. Mespelbrunn and von Aschenhausen is there. Thornley killed the Nazi colonel as revenge for the torture and murder of his Austrian fiancée.įrances and Richard visit the home of chess collector Dr. Richard and Frances are rescued by Gestapo chief Count Sig von Aschenhausen, a former Oxford schoolmate of Richard's. Officials insist on questioning each member of the audience.
During a passage that Thornley had been practicing earlier, a Nazi commandant is shot and killed. Some days later, Richard and Frances attend a performance of Liszt's music. She provides them with a book on Franz Liszt with annotations that reveal that their next stop should be the village of Pertisau in Tyrol, where they should inquire about a doctor who collects chess pieces. Werner instructs them to go to a certain museum, where a man named Count Hassert Seidel, calling himself a "guide," suggests that they check into a guest house run by Frau Kleist. Three pinpricks in the same map direct them to the book's seller, A.
The couple notice a series of ink dots on a map in the book, which, linked together, form a musical staff with the opening notes to the song " My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose." They deduce that this is their password. An unseen contact plants a tourist guidebook to southern Germany in Richard's coat. In Paris, Frances is given a hat decorated with a rose as a signal for their first contact, who silently instructs them to go to a café in Montmartre. Without knowing his name, what he looks like or where to find the scientist, the couple look upon the search as an adventure and cross Europe seeking clues from clandestine contacts. They are commissioned by the British secret service to find a scientist who has developed a countermeasure against a new Nazi secret weapon, a magnetic sea mine. In the spring of 1939 in England, Oxford University professor Richard Myles and his new bride Frances spend their honeymoon in continental Europe.