We are free people but this is the work of slaves." Jan, an Estonian with a history PhD, bristled with anger when he heard the word "gangmaster". Starting work picking daffodils at 7am yesterday in a muddy Cornish field, he said: "It is hard labour; your bones hurt at the end of the day. Jan, an Estonian with a history PhD, bristled with anger when he heard the word "gangmaster". After just five years he was downgraded from a high risk Category A to a minimum risk Category D prisoner. McLean was moved to Leyhill open prison in Gloucestershire.Within a year he had walked out of the prison and disappeared amid rumours that he had been helped by the security services. It was suggested that McLean may have been protected in return for information on other criminals and, effectively allowed to make millions from selling cannabis and stolen goods in the process.Although jailed for 28 years his sentence was quickly reduced to 21 on appeal and he was sent to Edinburgh's tough Saughton prison.McLean's reputation as an informer meant he was targeted by other criminals. Customs officer Alastair Soutar, 47, was killed during the operation when he was crushed between two boats.However, during McLean's trial it emerged that he was acting as a freelance informer supplying information to MI6 and was a registered informer with Lothians and Border Police.

For years McLean, 59, smuggled cannabis from Africa to Britain and built a lucrative sideline in stolen property.With the police unable to explain why their had been such a delay in identifying McLean Annabelle Ewing, home affairs spokeswoman for SNP Westminster, last night called for a full investigation into the affair.Described as one of Scotland's most dangerous men, McLean embarrassed the government when he went on the run from Leyhill open prison in Gloucestershire last November.Found guilty in 1997 for attempting to smuggle £10m worth of cannabis from Spain to Scotland by sea McLean's drugs career was interrupted after he was apprehended off the northern coast of Caithness. Mr Ondaatje, the brother of the author Michael Ondaatje, gave a substantial but undisclosed donation.The duke, whose family had owned the painting since 1853, had sold it to help fund repairs to his castle, Alnwick. It is to go on tour to Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow and Co Durham before going on display at the National in October.The successful resolution of the Madonna episode comes as the Tate waits to secure the Portrait of Omai by Joshua Reynolds after a year of negotiations.. One of the men arrested in connection with the deaths of 19 cocklers in Morecambe Bay said yesterday that British racism and bureaucratic failings had caused the disaster. He said he had no reason to suspect the man was a gangmaster and offered him £15 for each bag of cockles.Since the Chinese had been granted cockling permits, he said he assumed that they would be safe on the sands.

If permits had been granted to inexperienced illegal immigrants, Ben Bradshaw, the Fisheries minister, was culpable, he said.The Chinese workers braved perilous tides on 5 February, the day they died, because they wanted to evade cocklers who had threatened them racially and physically, Mr Eden said."These people have been persecuted not by gangmasters but by British people.'' He claimed that he had taped evidence of an interview with police in which an officer referred to the cocklers as "chinks''. "It's very flexible compared with Greek, perhaps because of being spoken by so many nations. Maybe now Greece has more immigrants moving in from North Africa and Albania, the language will begin to stretch a bit more."Karnezis also translates his own work into Greek. "I try not to use any idioms or slang in my writing, not even in the dialogue So I almost translate word by word It's not the Greek that Greeks write It's very different." What does change is the rhythm. "When I write in English, very slowly, a page a day, maybe less, I have a rhythm in mind, perhaps like rap music. I need to keep that rhythm before I start writing and then it seems to me it flows. When I translate I lose that rhythm most of the time, or it's a different music."His novel The Maze is set in Anatolia.

The remnants of a Greek brigade flees homewards after a defeat by the Turkish army. The brigade, literally on its last legs, limps into a small town near Smyrna with a Greek population. His characters are archetypal - the morphia-addicted brigadier, the idealistic major, the fanatical priest, the bitter teacher. It is 1922, the beginning of the modern age where faith confronts science, history opposes myth, and tradition is undermined by idealism.The rout is based on a true incident in the three-year war during which the Greeks penetrated almost as far as Ankara as an occupying force.But Karnezis locates his story a short time after the last battle.