There Is No Hiding Place

Northland Region Corrections Facility - Kaikohe - New Zealand.

Louie Dementer Kiss knew he was doomed.  In despair he sat alone in his cell on the first day of his sentence for the premeditated murder of an innocent being twelve years before; a life sentence carrying a 25 year minimum detained at Her Majesty's pleasure. But that wasn't his main worry. With his mind in turmoil he read again the letter that had awaited him on his return to the North following his sentencing in Auckland.

'So now Louie we know who you are, where you are and what you did and we can safely say it is all over for you. You have got to know we are coming to get you and even in that rat hole of a prison you are not safe. Your days are numbered. It is arranged. Look at the man next to you, the one you know so well, or the new face on the block. Who of those will be the one to slide the knife between your ribs at the right moment? Turn your back on nobody, ever, for the day you forget is the day you will remember and it will be too late for you. Everybody dies, but never worry because you won't die alone. One of us will be with you. Just get it into that thick Hungarian skull that you are going nowhere ever again. Don't turn your back. There is no hiding place.'

                                                                                                                    *

World War 2, London 1940. For 76 consecutive nights Adolph Hitler unleashed the fury of his Luftwaffe on Britain's largest city in a nonstop hail of bombs that had helpless civilians wilting under their blast. Step Green was three weeks old and his sister Tess two years when the Green family of eleven siblings sought refuge from the bombing and in desperation were evacuated from London's East End and dispatched to sympathetic countries of the British Empire to evade the Fuehrer's wrath. 77 child evacuees drowned when a German U-boat sank the ocean liner City of Benares on which they travelled.  Having been assessed as being too young to travel from their homeland, Step and Tess were sent to East Anglia to live with an aunt where they were reasonably safe from the war, but never safe from death which lurked in the hedgerows of Poplar Farm. Tess was brutally killed and at twelve years of age Step's loyalty and love for his sister committed him to a lifetime of retribution during which he travelled the world to satisfy his childhood vow to avenge her death. The killer was punished by the courts, but 'never enough', said Step who pursued that killer, released under a new identity, along his trail of freedom to Auckland New Zealand. It was there Step learned to love and to forgive and begin a new life with a brother he thought had perished in a dramatic action on the high seas, but with murder and arson in the headlines of Auckland newspapers it was judged Step Green had administered his own version of justice. Throughout the trial he refused to plead his innocence, or guilt and was committed to prison for life. Guilty, or not guilty? You be the judge.