MIDDAY EXPRESS

Tekirdağ Prison, Western Turkey, March 2011

A vaguely handsome man in an elegant black suit and black tie scrutinised me carefully as he entered the small, oblong room. His black eyes under a slightly receding hairline accentuated the hypnotic stare and, momentarily, I was tongue-tied. Here was the man I had been reading about, talking about, thinking about for nearly two years. Now, when I finally met him, I was suddenly unable to think of anything appropriate to say.

He may have been wasting in prison for two and a half years, but he had lost neither his poise nor his careful self-control. Throughout our three hours of discussion I was keenly aware that he was interviewing me just as much as I was interviewing him.

My first brief stay in Tekirdağ occurred in 1976, just before publication of the book Midnight Express, which was later made into a successful film by Alan Parker. It tells the story of Billy Hayes, a young American who was caught smuggling drugs out of Turkey. The hideous ordeal he suffered at the hands of a sadistic prison officer shocked audiences throughout Europe and the United States. Turkey had a reputation as a brutal and unforgiving country at the time; indeed, while I was there I had been attacked, while sleeping in a tent, by a group of hoodlums, to the accompaniment of demands for foreigners to go home.

Thirty-five years later I approached Tekirdağ prison. Like the one where Hayes had been kept, it was a top-security facility. Lying a mile or so up a moderate incline, it was surrounded by barren fields as far as the eye could see. Behind a thick curtain of heavy snow I spotted