Laurence O’Bryan - The Jerusalem Puzzle

He turned and looked up at the front of the building.

‘Yes, it was terrible,’ he said. ‘Mr Kaiser didn’t deserve that. He was always so friendly when we met him.’

He started walking back to the house.

Isabel was beside me. ‘Did he tell you where he was working in the city?’ she asked.

He stopped, turned. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘We worked with Max on a project in Istanbul,’ I said. We were forced together briefly by circumstances was the truth, but I wasn’t going to say that.

I pulled my wallet out, took out one of my cards and handed it to him.

He looked at it as if it was dirt.

‘We’re trying to work out what happened to Max.’

‘He never told me where he worked. I can’t help you. Good night.’

There was a woman by the door of the apartment block watching us. She had a black cat in her arms.

‘Maybe he told your wife,’ I said.

He shrugged. I went after him. He stopped at the door, turned.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said. The woman was staring at me with a suspicious expression. ‘We’re trying to find out what happened to Max Kaiser. Did he ever tell you where he was working here in Jerusalem?’

She looked at her husband. He shrugged.

‘It was so terrible what happened to him,’ she said. ‘You know, you are the first people to come by here, to take an interest in him. How did you know him?’

‘We met him in Istanbul. I used to work for the British Consulate there,’ said Isabel.

The woman smiled. ‘My mother fled to England during the war,’ she said.

I wanted to press her again, but I decided to wait.

She put her hand to her cheek. ‘We used to meet Mr Kaiser on the stairs. He was always covered in dust, always in a hurry.’

‘Did he say where he was working?’

‘No.’

I was about to turn and go when she said. ‘But I heard him saying something about Our Lady’s Church. Don’t ask me where it is. I was looking for my little Fluffy over there and he was getting into a taxi with another man.’ She patted her cat’s head, then pointed at the bushes near the road.

‘I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.’ She looked from me to Isabel.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I had no idea if the information was going to be helpful, but at least we’d gained something.

We walked back towards the roundabout. I expected to see the police car again. But they didn’t come. Finally, we saw a taxi with its light on. We were back in the hotel fifteen minutes later.

‘Can you tell me where Our Lady’s Church is?’ I said to the receptionist.

The man behind the desk shook his head. ‘There’s one somewhere in the Old City,’ he said. ‘That’s all I know.’

Upstairs I looked it up on the internet. The Wi-Fi was working, slowly again, but at least it was up and running.

‘Any luck?’ said Isabel, as she came back into the room from the bathroom.

‘The nearest to that name is an Our Lady’s Chapel just off the Via Dolorosa.’

‘That’s the street where people carry the cross at Easter, right?’ said Isabel.

‘Not just at Easter, all year round.’

‘Wonderful, we’re getting into the thick of it.’

‘Maybe Kaiser was just doing a bit of sightseeing,’ I said.

‘At some obscure chapel?’

‘Let’s go and take a look tomorrow.’

Seeing the Via Dolorosa was the kind of sightseeing most people do here. Irene had wanted to come to Jerusalem for a long time. She’d been interested in all this stuff. I’d always been too busy. I’d always thought there was going to be more time.

Irene had been brought up on High Church Sunday school stories of Jerusalem. I’d been brought up a Catholic, but there were one too many scandals, and all the outdated rules had put me off. But now I wanted to see the Via Dolorosa.

A memory of my dad going to mass came back to me. He’d never forced me to go with him, but I always knew he wanted me to.

After I left home I never went again. Irene had nagged me about it, asking me what I believed in. I never had a good answer, unless you count being flippant as an acceptable retort. I was good at all that back then.

For Irene, it had all meant more. She wasn’t a church goer, but she’d believed in helping people.

She’d volunteered to go out to Afghanistan. She didn’t have to. She’d been managing an emergency room at a busy hospital. She’d been the youngest in her class to rise to that position. She had responsibilities, and a lot more besides. But she wanted to give back.

I could feel the old anger bubbling.

For a while, since I’d been around Isabel, the anger had dissipated. Being here in Jerusalem, looking for Susan, was bringing it up again.

We made love that night. Isabel looked so beautiful. But I felt distracted, in a way I hadn’t before with her. Being in Jerusalem was unsettling me.

One of my problems was that I’d never wanted anyone else in the ten years I’d been with Irene. I know that doesn’t sound real, but it was true. I’d closed my mind to other women. Sure, I found some attractive, but Irene had been everything I’d ever wanted.

And I found it difficult to open up to anyone else after she died.

Isabel was the first person I felt I could really trust. One of the comments she’d made had stuck in my mind. You’re strong, Sean, but it’s not enough; you need love.

It was the best part of being with Isabel. I felt cared for.

I felt loved.

‘There’s something weird going on,’ said Henry. He shook his head. The social media tracking screen in front of him was blinking with the amount of data scrolling down it.

Normally he’d have let the automated systems deal with the feeds. They hunted for genuinely suspicious posts among the billions of Twitter, Facebook and forum posts, and spam ads and emails that filled the web each day. The algorithms they used were as important to the service as their best code-breaking tools.

The volume of postings on one subject was cresting like a wave. There’d been a thousand posts an hour about it yesterday. Now there was ten thousand an hour. And the rate was climbing.

Sergeant Finch looked down at him. She adjusted her glasses so they were further down her nose. She looked like a schoolmistress. A large and commanding school-mistress.

‘I hope this isn’t another one of your hunches,’ she said.

He smiled up at her. ‘This is no hunch. It’s a prophecy.’

‘You’re a prophet now?’ The smile at the corner of her mouth was either conspiratorial or from her anticipation of how she would describe this exchange to her boss over a coffee.

Henry didn’t care. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘This is about what’s been trending on Twitter and Facebook in Egypt over the last twenty-four hours.’

‘Are you going to tell me?’ Her eyes had darted to another monitoring screen operator who had raised a hand. The room was responsible for real-time monitoring about a hundred current threats to the UK’s national security.

‘All these posts are about a claim that a letter from the first Caliph of Islam has been found. Apparently, it states that Jerusalem, once captured by Islam, will remain Islamic for all time.’

‘Do we know if this letter is real?’

‘It’s being looked into.’

‘Let me know what they find, Henry. Another religious prophecy is the last thing they need in the Middle East. The place is a tinderbox right now. It could burst into flames at any moment.’

The following morning we took a taxi to the Via Dolorosa. If you imagine the Old City of Jerusalem as a roughly drawn square, a warren of narrow lanes, then the hill of the Temple Mount, with the golden Dome of the Rock floating above it to the bottom right. And the Via Dolorosa runs almost right to left across the middle, east to west that is, just above the Temple Mount. I say almost advisedly, because there’s a kink in the road as the two sides of it don’t exactly line up in the middle.