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Norwegian legal system which at that time equated drug smuggling with murder. It wasn’t even that he needed the huge amount of money he had been offered to deliver the sacks to an address in Oslo. So what was it? The thrill? Or the hope of seeing her again; the beautiful Thai girl in her silk dress with her long, shiny black hair, of looking into her almond eyes, hearing her soft voice whisper the difficult English words with sweet cherry lips, telling him he had to do it for her, for her family in Chiang Rai, that it was the only way he could save them. He had never believed her story, but he had believed in her kiss. And that kiss took him across oceans, through customs, into the remand cell, into the courtroom, into the visitors’ room where his almost grown-up daughter had sat down and told him that the family wanted nothing more to do with him, through the divorce and into the cell in Ila Prison. That kiss was all he had wanted and the promise of that kiss was all he had left.
    When he was released there had been no one waiting for him on the outside. His family had disowned him, his friends grown apart and he would never get work on a ship again. So he sought out the only people willing to accept him. Criminals. And resumed his old ways. Tramp shipping. Nestor, the Ukrainian, recruited him. Heroin from northern Thailand was smuggled in trucks using the old drug route via Turkey and the Balkans. In Germany the cargo was distributed to the Scandinavian countries and Johannes’s job was to drive the last stretch. Later he became a confidential informant.
    There hadn’t been a good reason for that, either. Only a police officer who appealed to something inside him, something he didn’t even know he had. And though that prospect – a clear conscience – had seemed worth less than the kiss of a beautiful woman, he had really believed in that police officer. There had been something about his eyes. Johannes might have gone straight, changed his ways, who knows? But then one autumn evening the police officer was killed. And for the first and only time Johannes heard the name, heard it whispered with a mixture of fear and awe. The Twin.
    From then on it was only a matter of time before Johannes was pulled back in again. He took bigger and bigger risks, moved bigger and bigger loads. Dammit, he wanted to get caught. Atone for what he had done. So he was relieved when customs officers pulled him over at the Swedish border. The furniture in the back of his lorry was stuffed full of heroin. The judge had reminded the jury both of the large quantity involved and that it wasn’t Johannes’s first offence. That was ten years ago. He had been at Staten for the last four years, since the prison opened. He had seen inmates come and go, seen prison officers come and go too, and he had treated them all with the respect they deserved. And, in return, he got the respect he deserved. That is to say, he enjoyed the respect the old-timer gets. The guy who is no longer a threat. Because none of them knew his secret. The betrayal he was guilty of. The reason he inflicted this punishment on himself. And he had given up all hope of finally getting the only things that mattered. The kiss he had been promised by a forgotten woman. The clear conscience he had been promised by a dead police officer. Until he had been transferred to A Wing and had met the boy they said could heal you. Johannes had been startled when he heard the surname, but he hadn’t said anything. He had just carried on mopping the floors, keeping his head down, smiling, doing and receiving the little favours that made life bearable in a place like this. The days, the weeks, the months and the years had flown by and turned into a life which would soon end. Cancer. Lung cancer. Small cell, the doctor had said. The aggressive kind which is the worst unless it is caught early.
    It hadn’t been caught early.
    There was nothing anyone could do. Certainly not Sonny. He hadn’t