CHAPTER 11

___________________

The Ghost Goes West

‘I don’t believe any party of would-be escapers ever worked harder or more consistently than ours, and this included all those grand fellows who helped for the sake of helping with no hope of participating in the final break-out.’

Brigadier James Hargest

‘He’s away!’¹ hissed Jim Hargest in a fierce whisper to Miles and Combe, who had resumed sitting on the stone bench. Hargest looked to his left. Sentry No. 1 was still lingering above Pip Stirling’s bonfire, looking down at the flames. Hargest glanced along the battlement walkway to his right. Sentry No. 2 was looking to his right, the 40 paces back to where Dick O’Connor had entered the embrasure. Something was wrong.² The guard started to walk towards Dick’s position, unslinging his Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5mm rifle. Hargest knew in that instant that the sentry had seen something. Hargest realised he had to be stopped, and fast.

Hargest turned back and whispered to Miles: ‘Sentry No. 2 has seen something. Go quickly and intercept him and for goodness sake keep his attention.’³ Miles immediately tried to catch the guard’s attention, but the sentry was completely focused on the flash of white he had seen by the embrasure and ignored the big South African.

What the sentry had seen out of the corner of his eye was a flash of one of O’Connor’s hands or a piece of his clothing as the General had struggled for those extra few seconds with the wooden block and its twisted rope.⁴ The sentry went to the nearest embrasure and leaned out, gasping in surprise. A small figure dressed in nondescript clothing and carrying a leather suitcase strapped to his back like a rucksack was most of the way down a brown rope.

The guard, in a considerable state of surprise, leaned out of the embrasure and levelled his rifle at the figure below, cycling the weapon’s bolt with a harsh metallic click.

O’Connor, who was deep in concentration as he clumsily abseiled down the side of the castle, realised that the game was up when he heard a loud cry from above. Gripping the rope for dear life, O’Connor looked up and saw the head and shoulders of the Italian guard leaning out from an embrasure some distance away. His rifle was pointed squarely at O’Connor’s dangling form.⁵

‘Arresto, arresto!’ yelled the Italian, ordering O’Connor to halt. ‘Fermati o sparo!’ O’Connor, who had studied Italian assiduously since being made a prisoner, knew exactly what the guard was yelling: ‘don’t move or I fire’. He needed no further warning. The rope creaked and a slight warm breeze wafted up from below the castle.

The alarm had been raised and below him O’Connor soon saw a mass of helmeted and heavily armed Italian soldiers running to the place where the end of his rope lay coiled in the grass. They pointed rifles with fixed bayonets at him and seemed to all be shouting at once.⁶ From their frantic gestures it was clear that they wanted him to climb down immediately. For a second or two O’Connor didn’t move, just hung on the rope, his two feet planted firmly against the castle’s rough stone wall, his arms aching badly from the effort to remain upright. A riot of emotions ran through his head. He had been foiled once again. But this experience would not in any way put him off having another go. While he remained a prisoner of the Italians, he would keep trying to escape.

Swallowing his disappointment, O’Connor clambered awkwardly down to the ground where the red-faced and excited Italians immediately accosted him.⁷ Stripped of his pack and roughly searched, the crowd of Italian soldiers around O’Connor suddenly fell silent and parted. O’Connor turned and watched as Captain Pederneschi, his Beretta pistol drawn, strode up, his black jackboots polished like mirrors. He fixed O’Connor with his keen brown eyes. Beneath the visor of his cap his face carried a truly malevolent expression.

*

It was generally agreed that Captain Pederneschi completely lost his cool following General O’Connor’s attempted escape. Neame wrote that Pederneschi went ‘half mad with excitement’⁸; doubtless as security officer he was humiliated by O’Connor’s successful vaulting of the castle wall. As well as yelling at O’Connor in an unintelligible stream of English and Italian, language for which General Neame complained to the commandant (the Italian officer, he said, had impugned the gentlemanly values of British officers),⁹ Pederneschi reserved his greatest wrath for the hapless sentry who had foiled the escape. The security officer ‘became almost hysterical, venting his rage on the poor sentry, calling him vile names and locking him up for the night.’¹⁰

O’Connor was bundled off to the commandant’s office for questioning shortly after being recaptured, before being locked in his bedroom while the wheels of Italian military bureaucracy swung into action.¹¹

The next day, 25 July, General Chiappe made yet another visit to the Castle, this time with orders from Rome to dispense punishments. The sentry locked up by Captain Pederneschi was released, Chiappe rewarding him with 500 lire for very sensibly not firing on the escaping British general.¹² Once more, the whole camp, including Dick O’Connor, was assembled for an official dressing-down.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Chiappe in a loud voice that echoed off the fortress’s walls. ‘There is no use attempting to escape. The castle is too strong; you will not escape from it alive. And even if you do, there is no chance of reaching the Swiss frontier.’¹³ Chiappe looked directly at O’Connor.

‘Generale, your punishment for attempting to escape is 30 days’ solitary confinement, to be served in a different fortress.’ O’Connor said nothing – he had expected nothing less than the regulation prison time for such an escapade.

‘Generale Miles, Generale Combe and Generale Stirling, for helping the prisoner to escape you are each sentenced to ten days’ solitary confinement, to be served in your rooms.’¹⁴

*

General O’Connor was to serve his sentence at Campo 5 at Gavi-Serravalle Scrivia in Piedmont, twenty miles north of the port of Genoa. The distance from Vincigliata was 165 miles. Tantalisingly, the new fortress was only 100 miles from Lake Como and the Swiss frontier. O’Connor was escorted from the castle to Campo 5 by an infantry colonel on Major-General Chiappe’s staff, accompanied by two Carabinieri.¹⁵ The strange vagaries of war showed themselves when O’Connor noticed that among the Italian colonel’s medal ribbons was the British Military Cross.¹⁶ He had been awarded it during the First World War, when the two countries were allies. The colonel pointed to the several rows of ribbons on O’Connor’s tunic, touching one in particular. It was the Italian Silver Medal of Military Valor, awarded to O’Connor by Italy in October 1918 during an offensive on the Piave River. Two old allies were now deadly enemies – in theory at least.

At Campo 5 General O’Connor was placed in a gloomy cell that would be his home for a month. It was furnished with a small bed, table, chair and two chamber pots. Little light entered through the two small, barred windows. He was permitted two hours of exercise each day on the fortress’s battlements, and his food was sent up from the main camp, where many British prisoners were housed. Forbidden to communicate with anyone, O’Connor overcame this ban by writing messages to the POW cooks on the inside of the mess tin that contained his hot food.¹⁷

*

While O’Connor languished in a jail cell, security at Vincigliata Castle was tightened further. The number of day sentries was increased and the sentries’ platform that ran around the inside of the battlements was wired in. This was done by placing eleven strands of barbed wire around the platform, effectively creating a wire box for the sentries to patrol inside and making it impossible to climb up on to the platform.

A single strand of wire was fixed to little metal poles positioned five feet inside the castle’s curtain wall.¹⁸ Captain Pederneschi explained its purpose to the prisoners when the work was completed.

‘This is the line of death,’ said Pederneschi darkly, pointing with one gloved hand at the wire. ‘No prisoner is allowed to cross it. If you do, you will be shot!’

The commandant instituted a series of rigorous room and kit searches, but due to the prisoners’ ingenuity at hiding illicit escape gear, nothing of any significance was found.¹⁹

*

On 3 August a new officer arrived at the castle. Surgeon-Captain Ernest Vaughan of the Indian Medical Service had been captured at Tobruk. General Neame had applied for a British doctor for the camp, and the request had finally been granted. Vaughan proved to be a first-class supporter of escapes as well as a fantastic doctor.²⁰ He was assigned a dispensary within the castle but soon complained that the number of Red Cross sanitary parcels containing medical supplies and drugs was not sufficient.²¹

*

By late August the leaves had started to turn and would soon fall from many of the trees around the castle. The prisoners greeted this sight with consternation. As summer gave way to autumn, the natural cover that was essential for escapers hiking cross-country was disappearing. Such a time marked the end of the effective escape season until spring 1943. But planning, at least, could continue – the question was what means the next escape attempt should take. Everything thus far had been a complete bust.

*

General De Wiart had long been urging that the escape effort should be redirected away from the castle’s walls. He had grown increasingly interested in the bricked-up chapel adjoining the large dining room on the keep’s ground floor. Various prisoners had speculated that there must be underground vaults or rooms beneath the castle that could be used for escape. It seemed a perfectly sensible idea considering the great age of the fortress and its many rebuilds down the centuries. One lucky find had been a dusty old Italian book about Vincigliata Castle that was discovered mouldering in the corner of a closed-up room. It was studied carefully, in the hope that more of the castle’s secrets would be revealed.²²

Soon after O’Connor was sent away, De Wiart approached Neame urging him to formulate a plan to get into the chapel and explore. ‘The castello with its crazy planning ought to have been a labyrinth of secret passages,’ wrote De Wiart, ‘leading straight to the top of the highest mountain or into a lovely lady’s boudoir in a neighbouring villa.’²³ But the castle’s design had proved extremely frustrating. ‘All the passages led stupidly into one another, like a dog chasing its tail,’²⁴ wrote De Wiart. Many dark words were passed concerning the Englishman’s Castle and the infernal Englishman who had rebuilt it.

‘As now attempts have been made over the wall, by day and by night, there only remains under the wall,’²⁵ stated De Wiart. Neame agreed and called a meeting consisting of De Wiart, Boyd, Combe, Miles, Hargest and Stirling, with himself as chairman. Boyd and Miles had already examined the outside walls of the chapel, which was located on the northwest corner of the great keep, and made tentative sketches of its ground plan.²⁶

‘I have no idea how on earth we are going to break into the damn place,’ said Air Vice-Marshal Boyd. ‘The bricked-up doorway opens straight into the main courtyard, so we couldn’t open it up without being observed.’

‘Then the only way in would be through the wall of the keep,’ said Miles.

‘But we’ve no idea how thick the keep wall is,’ said Combe. ‘Judging by the rest of the castle, it’s bound to be bally substantial.’

‘I suggest we make a detailed reconnaissance first,’ said Neame, calmly, his engineer’s mind already starting to tick over. ‘We can at least get a look inside through that little grille above the door. We’ll try tomorrow afternoon, when most of the Italians are having their siesta.’²⁷ Regardless of any potential problems, ‘hope rose strongly within us at once,’ wrote Jim Hargest, ‘and almost without discussion we were agreed to give it a try.’²⁸

The next afternoon, out of sight of the sentries patrolling the high walls, Neame and the ‘Tunnel Committee’ mounted their first detailed exploration of the chapel. Taking a table from one of the rooms, Neame climbed up to the grille that was set about eight feet off the ground. The opaque glass shutter was open and, cupping his hands around his face, he peered through the grille, allowing his eyes to adjust to the gloom inside.

‘I can see a small lobby,’ said Neame slowly. ‘Then there’s an archway leading through to the chapel.’²⁹ Neame strained his eyes, his engineering training taking over. ‘Wait … the lobby is outside the keep wall … the archway has been cut through the main keep wall. Interesting.’ Neame jumped down from the table, and the others quickly took it back inside.

‘Let’s have a look at the dining room that adjoins the chapel,’ said Neame, striding off with the others following him. In between the chapel wall and the dining room was a narrow service area that was dominated by a service lift and shaft. Neame peered up into the lift shaft. He saw that at the top of the shaft was a dummy archway in the wall, where he estimated the wall was about nine inches thinner than elsewhere. It was not the main keep wall. ‘If we’re going to break into the chapel, then that’s the only place I can think we’d stand any chance of success,’³⁰ said Neame seriously.

A new meeting of the Tunnel Committee was called for the following day, once Neame had had a chance to think about the engineering overnight.

‘When the lift is in the “up” position,’ said Neame, ‘the place where we will make a hole is completely concealed. Even with the lift down the closed doors of the lift shaft hide the area we’re interested in. The light in the shaft is also dim – any way we could make it dimmer?’

‘I can paste some paper over the small window in the service lobby,’ said Miles. ‘That should help.’

‘Splendid,’ said Neame smiling. ‘What I suggest is sinking a shaft and tunnel through the chapel floor if we don’t find any hidden vaults. I think we should commence work on breaking into the chapel at once. I suggest we work in reliefs of two.’³¹

Neame placed Boyd in charge of the operation to break into the chapel. More manpower was brought in in the form of Brigadier Todhunter. The teams were Boyd/Miles, Combe/Todhunter and Stirling/Hargest.³² Others, including some of the younger orderlies, would support as and when needed.

Most importantly, a system of lookouts was necessary to ensure that those breaking into the chapel would not be discovered in the event of a surprise visitation by the Italians. A team of watchers led by General De Wiart, who due to his disabilities could not excavate, was arranged from a bedroom overlooking the white wall that led into the Italian sector of the castle. If any Italians were to enter the POW area through the white wall gate, the excavators could be warned at once.³³

It was decided to fit the excavations in around the camp’s usual routine, so as not to arouse suspicion. The Italians conducted twice-daily inspections and a head count, the prisoners were served meals at set times, and walks in the castle grounds and the local countryside were scheduled in the afternoons, weather permitting. Attendance was voluntary, so the workers on shift would not be missed provided they turned up every so often for an excursion. The excavators could work safely, under the cover of the watchers, twice a day: at 7.30–9.30am and 2.00–4.00pm.

The wall into the chapel, even though substantially thinner than the keep wall, proved very tough to break through. It was, the men would discover, two feet six inches thick, and was composed of solid masonry. It was essential that those doing the work made as little noise as possible, as the nearest sentries on the battlements were only ten to twenty yards away.

The prisoners lacked the right tools – all that could be sourced were some improvised short iron crowbars, a carpenter’s chisel and mallet, and a shovel.³⁴ The crowbars were simply iron bars sharpened by Sergeant Baxter using the kitchen range as a furnace. Lord Ranfurly manufactured the shovel out of a piece of sheet iron, fixing a wooden handle to it. An old kitchen knife was also used, Boyd fitting it with a new wooden handle. The spoil was initially removed using garden buckets, but later the teams switched to canvas pails to cut down on noise.³⁵

It took the team five days to cut a small hole through the wall. The hole was slowly widened until a person could wriggle through into the chapel. Boyd was commissioned to manufacture a three-ply wooden cover for the hole, disguised to look like plaster.³⁶ Lord Ranfurly manufactured a contraption to hold the board in place within the carefully cut square in the original plaster. He used a bottle of water as a weight inside a hollow tube of wood attached to the panel with a cord. ‘To open the door,’ recalled Hargest, ‘one had merely to pull the panel out and lower it down the lift well out of the way, while to replace it one raised it and fitted it in – the bottle did the rest.’³⁷

Noise was a problem. The two-man teams would stand on top of the lift that was normally used to bring food up to the generals’ dining room from the servants’ kitchen below.³⁸ As they chipped and cut away at the plaster and then the mortar that held the wall together, pieces clattered into the top of the metal lift, making a terrible noise that was greatly magnified by the narrow lift shaft. Any movement by the men atop the lift caused it to sway and crash into the sides of the shaft with a loud boom. A further problem was the constant cloud of plaster dust – it soon fouled up the lift’s electric mechanism. Brigadier Hargest’s gammy hip started playing up, leaving him often unable to work, but Miles and Stirling made particularly excellent progress.³⁹

*

Once inside, the men found the chapel to be quite large, with windows set very high in the walls–so high, in fact, that nobody could look in from outside. The room was about twenty feet by twenty feet by fifteen feet,⁴⁰ with an altar, and the lobby or porch was about seven feet square and lower than the chapel itself by three steps. It was dark and gloomy inside, making it ideal for concealment.⁴¹

The chapel was crammed full of old boxes, dusty furniture and gloomy oil paintings. The room clearly hadn’t been touched for years. They even discovered a case of good champagne and a single bottle of whisky. The alcohol wasn’t touched. If the Italians discovered the excavation the last thing any of the prisoners needed was a further charge of petty theft.

The camp’s master electrician, Sergeant Bain, was brought in to ‘fix’ the lift – he altered the mechanism so that it could only be lowered by pressing the button at the bottom, located in the servants’ pantry. This was a further attempt at concealment should any nosy sentry peer into the lift shaft. Bain also removed the light at the top of the shaft.⁴²

*

The question now was where to begin the tunnel. Neame ruled out the chapel, as it would involve moving the altar. Instead, the obvious place was the lobby. The tunnel would pass beneath the courtyard wall rather than under the main keep wall (as would be necessary if the tunnel were dug from the chapel itself) and Neame suspected that the courtyard wall had shallower foundations. Boyd would remain in charge of the actual excavation, with Neame acting as tunnel designer and engineer. The first task was to survey the land under which the tunnel would pass and decide upon the dimensions of the proposed tunnel.

After a heated debate with the other members of the Tunnel Committee, Neame settled upon his final plan.

‘So, we are agreed,’ said Neame to the group. ‘The initial shaft will be ten feet straight down from the floor of the chapel lobby. Then a tunnel, of four feet by two feet, will open out from the shaft, driving straight across and under the driveway towards the outer wall.’⁴³

Neame conducted a secret survey, which had to be done very carefully lest the sentries got wind. The distances were checked and rechecked, and Neame’s calculations proved extremely accurate. Measuring the difference in level was far more difficult, ‘as dead ground outside the castle, and the rising shaft in the end was two feet six inches deeper than I anticipated,’ wrote Neame. ‘Seven feet instead of four feet six inches – owing to a raised flower-bed held up by the stone revetment outside the wall.’⁴⁴ After several rounds of calculation, the tunnel would be dug on a downward slope of 1-in-8, ‘so as to be fourteen feet deep on reaching the outer wall.’ Neame’s intention was to connect with the curtain wall’s foundations, leaving two options: either cut through the foundation of the wall, or burrow under it leaving a rising shaft to the outside. ‘It was also essential to touch and identify the base of the outer wall, so as to know where we were, for it was intended to come out immediately outside the wall, for concealment’s sake.’⁴⁵ This might help the escapers as the only way sentries on the high wall above could see the base of the wall was by leaning out of a battlement – an unlikely proposition unless the escapers made any noise. In total, the tunnel would extend for 35 feet.⁴⁶

How all this was worked out was truly remarkable, considering that Neame had no proper instruments. But Sergeant Bain, who Neame noted would have been commissioned if he hadn’t been captured, made a series of survey instruments from protractors for Neame to use, and they also had a prismatic compass to carefully check all bearings.⁴⁷

*

The tunnel broke ground on 18 September 1942. The honour of starting was given to Combe and Hargest. Brigadiers Todhunter and Stirling cleared a space by moving furniture and paintings out of the way. Breaking ground actually proved to be much more difficult than anticipated. The craftsmen that John Temple-Leader had employed to rebuild the castle half a century earlier had known their business. It took Combe and Hargest the entire first work session just to lever up two close-fitting tiles in the chapel porch floor. The noise was excessive, and the watchers that De Wiart had placed above could hear quite clearly the sounds which echoed through the building.

One watcher was placed in the dining room to watch the two gateways into the prisoners’ part of the castle from the Italian quarters, with another in Brigadier Vaughan’s bedroom on the keep’s first floor to watch the sentries. But the routine was exhausting and inefficient, so De Wiart altered the arrangements. One man in Vaughan’s bedroom would watch the gateways, while another was placed in De Wiart’s bathroom with an excellent view of the sentries on the wall. The shutters in both rooms were carefully arranged so that the watchers could fulfil their duty without being observed from outside. A rotating system saw watchers work shifts of twenty minutes before being relieved, thereby maintaining their edge.⁴⁸

But the system of watchers could still be improved. Sergeant Bain rigged up an electric bell system using buzzers and bits of wiring that the prisoners salvaged or pinched from all over the castle. Buttons were secretly installed in Vaughan’s bedroom and De Wiart’s bathroom that were connected to a buzzer in the chapel porch.⁴⁹ A simple series of signals was worked out that enabled the watchers to alert the digging team to approaching trouble.

One buzz meant ‘stop temporarily’. Two buzzes meant ‘carry on again’. Three buzzes signalled ‘alarm – come to surface and prepare to evacuate’, while four buzzes was the most serious, warning, ‘really serious – be prepared for anything’.⁵⁰

*

On 1 October 1942 Dick O’Connor returned from Campo 5. He had been held longer than his sentence, probably due to some administrative mix-up. His bout of solitary hadn’t dampened his escaping spirit at all; in fact, his recent failure had made him even more determined to get out. ‘I was delighted to see my friends again,’ wrote O’Connor, ‘and was also pleased to find that they were already well on with another escape project.’⁵¹

*

Air Vice-Marshal Boyd told Neame that he no longer wanted command of the digging operation following some bickering with the other men, and he reverted to an ordinary worker for the duration. Dick O’Connor joined, replacing Brigadier Todhunter, who dropped out, and Neame asked the charismatic O’Connor to take command of the working parties. General De Wiart would continue to organise and command the lookouts. As usual, General Dick was raring to go.

*

In early October Brigadier Todhunter celebrated his birthday and, as was now customary, a party was thrown in his honour. It was a pleasant diversion from the serious business of tunnelling. ‘The kitchen staff managed to make an iced cake with chocolate with the Arms of Essex on it,’ wrote home Todhunter proudly. ‘For dinner we had hors d’oeuvres in which the pièce de résistance was tinned pâté de fois gras: “Viener Schnitzel” made of rabbit with fried onions and potatoes and a savoury of tinned bangers on toast.’⁵² But Todhunter had pause for reflection over what occurred next. ‘I took my cake down for the batmen to finish and it made me feel a bit old,’ he wrote. The batmen evidently had the measure of Todhunter as a hunting, fishing, country gentleman of the old school and were discussing appropriate decorations for him: as he approached the messroom he heard a booming voice say, ‘The poor old bloke might have had a gun on his cake!’⁵³ It was Todhunter’s 42nd birthday; he was one of the youngest of the senior officer prisoners in the castle.

*

One morning in late October 1942 Owen Boyd had just come off a digging shift in the tunnel. Progress was exceptionally slow. Between opening the shaft in the chapel porch on 18 September and O’Connor’s arrival back at the castle, the vertical shaft had progressed just three feet. The need to work as silently as possible, and the two short excavation periods each day slowed the work. The dimensions of the hole also meant that only one man could work, while his partner stood by to relieve him.⁵⁴ The soil was hard-packed clay with horizontal strata of rock. Working through the rock bands was very difficult with the basic tools that were available and the other limitations. Boyd was exhausted. It was 8.00am, and he clambered back through the hole in the chapel wall on to the lift, before emerging from the shaft in the pantry beside the orderlies’ kitchen. Like everyone else, he wore an old pair of woollen pyjamas when digging, and these were filthy and encrusted with dirt and clay.⁵⁵ One day, when General Neame had been so dressed, and clambering awkwardly through the chapel wall hole from the lift, one of the other diggers had facetiously remarked, ‘the ghost goes west’.⁵⁶ It was a more appropriate remark than many realised at the time, for they were like wraiths, surreptitiously flitting about the great castle at all hours and disappearing through apparently solid walls.

Boyd wore long socks pulled up over his pyjama bottoms to keep the worst of the dirt from accumulating on his shins. The socks had been stripped off and stuffed into his greatcoat pockets, and a pair of unlaced shoes hastily slipped on. Boyd didn’t feel worried about moving around at this time – Carton de Wiart’s screen of watchers had given no alarm on the tunnel’s warning buzzer.

Boyd started back up the stairs towards his room. As he turned a corner he ran straight into Captain Pederneschi. Boyd took a step back in silent horror, his heart hammering in his chest. No Italian officer should have entered the keep without a warning sounding from one of the two watchers on the first floor. What the hell the castle’s chief watchdog was doing prowling around at this time of the day immediately put Boyd in mind of a search or the discovery of their escape plot. Pederneschi stared at Boyd, his eyes looking him up and down, evidently intrigued by Boyd’s unusual sartorial arrangement.

‘Air Marshal Boyd,’ said Pederneschi, ‘where are you going?’

Boyd, involuntarily thrusting his dirty hands into his pockets, thought quickly.

‘A book, Captain,’ he said. ‘I was looking for a book.’⁵⁷

‘I see,’ replied Pederneschi flatly. His eyes glanced down at Boyd’s pockets. ‘And where is your book?’

‘Couldn’t find the blessed thing,’ spluttered Boyd. ‘Must’ve left it in my room after all.’ Pederneschi didn’t look convinced, and he kept looking Boyd up and down with his sharp brown eyes.

‘I’m getting old I guess,’ said Boyd, adding a nervous laugh. ‘Forgetful.’

Pederneschi relaxed and smiled.

‘Ah yes, getting old is a terrible thing, no?’

‘Indeed,’ muttered Boyd. ‘Well, if you’ll excuse me, Captain, I must get dressed for breakfast.’ Boyd pushed past Pederneschi and rapidly climbed up the stairs, the slightly grubby legs of a pair of white long johns sticking out from under his coat as he climbed.

Pederneschi watched him go. The security officer stood for a few seconds, staring up the now empty staircase, as if deep in thought, his dark eyes slightly narrowed and blank. Then he turned, shrugging his shoulders, before he resumed climbing down to the ground floor.