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the prison's high, faded cream walls and watchtowers manned by silhouetted machine-gunners. My first impression suggested that nothing had changed since Parker's movie.

Inside, however, I was relieved to learn that in this part of the country at least prison conditions had improved beyond recognition. All inmates had a television, shower and toilet in their cell. The food was a touch spartan, but undoubtedly nutritious and reasonably tasty, while the guards acted with courtesy, not just towards me, but towards the pris- oners as well. In several respects conditions here were preferable to those found in many British prisons.

There were some notorious convicts in Tekirdağ, including the instigator of the murder of Hrant Dink, the ethnic Armenian writer assassinated by extremists for, well, being an ethnic Armenian writer. It was also no surprise that the prison contained some of Turkey's most notorious drug lords.

And among the terrorists and mafia dons there was a representative of the most state-of-the-art form of malfeasance - cybercrime. It had taken me more than a year to get an audience with Çağatay Evyapan: I had needed to convince both the Turkish authorities and Evyapan himself. For months, this seemed completely impossible. My astonish- ment was boundless when I received a message one Monday in early March 2011 from the Prison Directorate in Ankara informing me that, if Çağatay was willing, I would be permitted to see him that very Wednesday. After that, I was told, Çağatay would be moved and my window of opportunity would be slammed shut.

What the Turkish authorities did not know, nor would they have cared, was that my passport was deep in the bowels of the consular section of the Chinese Embassy in London, having a visa processed. My attempts to extract the passport in order to fly to Istanbul on Tuesday were dismissed robotically by the Chinese officials. Instead, I contacted Tekirdağ prison directly and begged them to allow me to postpone the interview for one day. I was informed that if they received the order to move Cha0 before Thursday, then regardless of whether or not I travelled there, I would not be permitted to see him. The hunt would be over.

So I was extremely agitated as I battled my way through the snow- storm from Istanbul to Tekirdağ on Thursday morning, a day late. It was quite possible that I would arrive only to be told that I had lost

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