Chapter One - The Garden of Sin

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A small stone house in the heart of Bodrum Town sat prettily in a secret garden littered with cracked antiquities and dominated by a double-trunked olive tree older than God. It was the original homestead of Turkish gentry, but when the family grew in wealth and status they moved to grander pastures, leaving the estate to fade into quaint dilapidation. As time rolled by, marauding grapevines sunk their tendrils into the mud-mortared walls and wild flowers blanketed the courtyard in a twist of camomile and hollyhocks. For years, the tumbledown house remained hidden behind its sturdy garden walls, until, that is, the elders spotted a business opportunity targeted at a mushrooming community of expats. Selling off the family silver was decidedly un-Turkish, but renting it out to the moneyed infidels was an altogether different proposition: some yabancılar were more than happy to pay top dollar for a generous slice of authenticity. After months of wrangles with town planners and a spot of palm greasing on the side, the clan renovated their ancestral seat and on the same plot, built a larger reproduction cottage in reclaimed stone where a derelict barn had once stood. The two toffee coloured houses stood out from the whitewashed norm, happy snapper delights peering over the garden wall at the hurly burly of a town on the march.

The varnish was barely dry when the spruced up manor attracted the attention of two evicted Brits looking for somewhere new to lay their hats.

'This is it,' I had said as we explored the renovated house. 'The real deal.'

The original family home had an unconventional higgledy-piggledy open plan charm and came with working fireplaces and a converted basement once used to corral livestock, the kind of place you'd imagine the Madonna pitching up to on Christmas Eve, heavy with the Messiah and looking for a budget manger.

Liam wasn't entirely convinced. 'Do I look like an ass?'

We tried the house next door. The larger and perfectly formed replica had been constructed in traditional Aegean style - thick stone walls, flat roof and exposed wooden beams - and came with newfangled luxuries like rooms and doors.

'Is special wood,' said our potential landlady, pointing down at the oak floor as we toured the mezzanine bedroom. 'From special forest.'

The special wood from the special forest came at a special price but as Bodrum had always provided refuge to the exiled and the unorthodox, we gambled on getting the going rate for 'theatrical' types. Supplemented by Liam's feeble but endearing attempts at Turkish, the gamble paid off and Hanife the Magnificent, the undisputed matriarch of an old Bodrum family, accepted us and our pink pounds with open hands. We paid our rent and two weeks later, moved into Stone Cottage No. 2 on the corner of Sentry Lane and Turkey Street. And so it came to pass that by happy coincidence we found ourselves living on the same road as the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

'I think,' Liam had said at the time, 'you would call that a result.'

Our new landlady was a tiny but formidable ex-teacher, a gutsy pensioner with a shock of silver running through a neat black bob. Hanife lived with her doting husband in a three-storey townhouse on the opposite side of Turkey Street, a nondescript concrete block with a side yard of rapacious chickens. She may have been pleased with her colourful new tenants and happy to put up with their aberrant ways, but Hanife was fiercely proud of her heritage and took every opportunity to educate her stooges in the ways of Turkish sensibilities.

'Londra?' she had announced as we handed over an envelope stuffed with fifty lira notes. 'Ha! You run like stupid rats in tunnels of metro. Is no life! In Turkey, we live!'

If Hanife appeared unruffled by our exotic union then she was equally nonplussed by the arrival, a few weeks later, of Beril and Vadim, a maverick and unwed Turkish couple who had escaped the conformity of Ankara to take possession of Stone House No. 1 and join us in the garden of sin. Vadim was a retired rock and roller, a portly, rosy-cheeked percussionist in his late fifties, obsessed with drums and wedded to his collection of Turkish darbukas.

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