The disappearance of three German officers on Combe Island during the Second World War is both a wartime mystery and a story about how families and communities preserve—or suppress—the past. The men were officially posted as missing, believed drowned, but their fate emerged only through a belated chain of inquiry and testimony, in which the island’s history and the Oliver family’s silence shaped what could be known.

Background and the First Account

Raimund Speidel’s search began with a family history that had treated his father’s disappearance as a convenient end to an already failing marriage. His mother came from a distinguished Prussian military family, which regarded the marriage as a misalliance; her relatives were also dissatisfied that her husband served with the occupying force on Guernsey rather than in a more prestigious regiment or role. The family learned that he and two fellow officers had gone to Combe Island after it was believed evacuated. After an investigation disclosed the excursion, they were presumed lost at sea. Their deaths ended the marriage without divorce or public ignominy, though not with the military glory the family might have preferred.

The official record Speidel eventually found was more specific about the men’s departure, but not their fate: the three young officers had gone absent without leave, taking a thirty-foot sailing boat fitted with an engine, and never returned. They were listed as missing, believed drowned. Speidel did not know whether their journey had been authorized by their commanding officer, and suspected it had not been. A fellow officer, bound by secrecy about what the father had confided, supplied a possible purpose: the men intended to raise the German flag on a small island off the Cornish coast, perhaps to demonstrate that it could be done. Combe Island seemed the only possible destination, but the plan remained an inference rather than an established fact.

The silence persisted into the next generation. Speidel had been told little about his father as a child and came to understand that questions were unwelcome. When his twelve-year-old son asked about his grandfather and resented the absence of any recorded or spoken account, Speidel promised to investigate. Official sources offered little; a retired fisherman, more than eighty years old, provided some information when Speidel visited Cornwall the previous year, though local suspicion made inquiry difficult. His eventual journey to Combe Island thus pursued more than a missing wartime record: it sought to recover a history that the family had left unspoken and that local memory had not readily surrendered.

The Lighthouse Fire and Its Conflicting Accounts

Before the wartime episode, Combe Island already carried a history of violence. The family had acquired it in the sixteenth century, after Mediterranean pirates had used it as a base to raid southern English coasts and seize people for enslavement. The island’s reputation for imprisonment, rape, and torture persisted in local memory, making it difficult to find temporary staff. During the Phoney War, the island remained occupied, but in October 1940, after the fall of France and the death of Emily Holcombe’s brother at Dunkirk, her parents decided to leave. The last staff were taken to the mainland by Saul Oliver and the steward; Saul then returned with his young son Nathan, saying he had final tasks to complete and that the house was not secure.

Emily Holcombe later dated the episode to the night of October 10, 1940, but her account was not eyewitness testimony: years afterward, Saul had told her what happened when he was barely coherent and within two weeks of his death. Three German officers from the occupied Channel Islands landed on Combe. Their purpose remained uncertain; they may have been on reconnaissance or pursuing a private venture, and Raimund Speidel thought they might have intended to raise the German flag on the disused lighthouse. After first light, the men climbed the tower. Saul found their boat and, knowing that the lighthouse’s ground floor stored dry animal fodder, set the straw alight. The flames and smoke rose into the upper chamber. The officers could not escape to the lantern: its railings were unsafe and its door had been nailed shut. All three probably suffocated.

According to Saul’s account, he waited for the fire to burn out, found the bodies halfway up the tower, carried them to the officers’ boat, and scuttled it in deep water using the dinghy from his own sailing boat. Emily said Saul had taken both Nathan and Tom Tamlyn, Jago Tamlyn’s grandfather, with him. She also reported Saul’s claim that four-year-old Nathan had started the fire while playing with matches found in the house. The boy panicked and denied being near the lighthouse; Emily had believed Saul at the time, but later doubted the story. Nathan himself, as far as she knew, never spoke of the episode.

The return journey left another unresolved death. Saul said Tom Tamlyn fell overboard during the stormy crossing to the mainland. His body washed ashore six weeks later, and the damaged skull yielded little evidence beyond a blow to the back of the head. The coroner returned an open verdict, while the Tamlyn family believed Saul had murdered Tom to conceal what had happened on Combe. Thus the officers’ disappearance was bound to a second suspected killing, with the surviving accounts divided between an accident, wartime concealment, and a child’s possible role in the fire.

The Story's Uncertain Inheritance

Emily Holcombe’s account reached Adam Dalgliesh through a long and fragile chain of memory. Saul Oliver told her his version years after the fire, when he was barely coherent and within two weeks of death. Holcombe had lost touch with him during and after the war, and had only rarely returned to the West Country after going to London to drive an ambulance and then resuming her studies at Oxford. She could not be certain whether Saul had wanted to confess or boast; although she thought he had told her as much as he was prepared to reveal, his account remained a deathbed recollection shadowed by earlier rumours, not a fully verified record.

The gaps between the sources are part of the event’s lasting significance. Official records established that the officers went absent without leave and were presumed drowned; family silence, local suspicion, and Saul’s late testimony supplied competing explanations without settling every detail. Holcombe herself revised her confidence in Saul’s claim that Nathan had started the fire, and resisted treating that uncertain childhood story as an explanation for Nathan Oliver’s later death. She regarded Raimund Speidel as humane and Jago Tamlyn as someone who had had many opportunities to act if he meant to kill Nathan. The wartime disappearance therefore returns not as a closed case but as an inherited secret whose partial disclosure casts suspicion forward while leaving its central uncertainties intact.

Testimony and the Limits of Certainty

Holcombe presents her account not as the whole truth but as the portion she can attest to, while Dalgliesh listens and watches her across the room. The disclosure arrives through nested testimony: the investigator hears Holcombe, who is recalling Saul Oliver’s late account, itself shaped by what he chose to say and by the rumors that had circulated before he spoke. That structure leaves the officers’ fate more fully imagined than officially established. The fire, the bodies, and the scuttled boat explain how the disappearance might have occurred; they do not turn a family recollection into a verified record, or resolve the lingering questions about the deaths surrounding it.