The Jerusalem Puzzle (4 page)

I was hoping the dream wouldn’t come back when I fell asleep again, but it did, and the flames were nearer this time and hotter.

But this time I was woken by a voice.

‘Sean, Sean, wake up.’ Isabel’s tone was concerned. I was breathing fast. I sat up.

‘Was it the same as before?’ she asked. She hugged me.

‘Yeah.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her about the flames. That part was new. The fear wasn’t.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘No, I’ll be ok,’ I said.

I lay down again. Isabel had spent a couple of nights asking me all about what had happened to Irene; how I felt about everything that had happened. It had been good to talk, but this felt different and after her speech about people being burnt to death before we came here, it didn’t seem right to tell her what had got into my dreams.

It was light when I next woke. I’d slept a long time. Isabel was in the shower. The hum of cars, a distant car horn honking and the morning sounds of Jerusalem filled the air when I opened the balcony door. I was glad the night was over.

The traffic was heavy on the road outside. A bell tolled far away. I stared at the old walls of the city. They looked like props from a movie about Crusaders and Saracens. A rolling blanket of clouds filled the sky.

I looked up Max Kaiser on the internet. There were quite a few pieces about his body being found at the back of Lady Tunshuq’s Palace. The police had questioned some local hard-line Islamists. Others were being sought. It was clear who they thought had murdered him.

I found an older article about some work Kaiser had done with a scientist attached to the Hebrew University. His name was Simon Marcus. Had Kaiser met him again while he was out here?

I trawled the Hebrew University website looking for anyone I might know. I needed someone to introduce me to Simon Marcus, someone he would trust.

After almost giving up, I finally found what I was looking for. A Dr Talli Miller in the Laser Research Unit. We had a tenuous connection, but it was better than nothing. She’d presented a paper at a conference I’d spoken at and we’d been at the same table for lunch. It was enough.

I found a contact number and picked up the hotel phone to call her. The number at the university rang and rang. I looked at my watch. It was just past 9.00 a.m. Surely they were open?

Finally a voice answered.

‘University’ was the only word I understood. It was a thin voice. She was speaking in Hebrew, the main language in Israel, the ancient language of Judaism. I knew only a few words of it. Easy words, like shalom: hello.

‘Dr Talli Miller,’ I said.

Normally I’d have spent time learning a language if I was visiting somewhere. My German wasn’t bad following a project we’d worked on in the Black Forest, but a day and a half wasn’t long enough to learn any language, no matter how dedicated you were.

The line sounded dead. Had she hung up?

Then it fizzed.

‘Shalom,’ said a woman’s voice. Talli’s voice.

‘Hi, it’s Sean Ryan. I’m in Jerusalem.’

There was a long silence.

‘Who?’

It was nice to be recognised so quickly. ‘Sean Ryan, I was on the panel when you gave a speech about high temperature lasers at the University of London.’

‘Sean, Sean.’ She repeated my name slowly. ‘How are you?’ Suddenly she was friendly and her voice returned to normal. We reminisced for a few minutes. Then I asked her if she knew Dr Simon Marcus. She did, but not well.

‘That’s a pity,’ I said. ‘I need to speak to him urgently.’

‘I may be able to do something. I’ll call you in a few minutes. What hotel are you in?’

I told her. My spirits lifted. I’d done it. My connections were going to get me to Simon Marcus.

We ate breakfast in a long high-ceilinged dining room. There were groups of people in the room speaking French, Polish and Spanish, all pilgrims visiting their Holy City.

The breakfast, a selection of cheeses, scrambled eggs, olives, jams and soft bread would have satisfied anyone.

One of the waiters, a black-haired, smiling man, came to our table with a wireless telephone handset as we were finishing.

‘Dr Ryan?’ he said.

I nodded. I never used my title in public, but Talli might have used it when she rang the reception. I took the phone.

‘Hello.’

‘I’ll be at your hotel in one hour. Be ready.’ The voice was Talli’s, but the friendliness was gone. In its place was a distinct hardness, the sort of attitude she probably reserved for her most disrespectful students, the ones who insulted her in a lecture.

The line went dead.

‘She’s on her way,’ I said.

An hour later we were in the hotel lobby. I went outside to see if she was coming. It was cool, but my suede jacket was enough to keep me warm. After a while I went back inside.

An hour and a half later we were still waiting.

By then it was nearly eleven. I called the Hebrew University. A receptionist answered. She checked, then came back and told me that Dr Talli Miller was not available.

By 11.30 a.m. I was properly pissed off. We took turns
going back up to the room. God only knew what had happened to Talli. Had I misheard her about the time? No, I couldn’t have. I even tried asking the hotel if they could bring up the number of the person who’d called me. They couldn’t.

For something to do I looked up the main hospitals in Jerusalem and went to their websites on my phone using the hotel lobby Wi-Fi. I was thinking about calling them, asking them if a Dr Susan Hunter had been admitted. We might just get lucky. I took a note of their telephone numbers. I was about to start calling when Talli appeared through the revolving main door of the hotel. Her hair was a mess.

She came towards us, looking solemn. She wasn’t the person I’d remembered from the last time we’d met. That had been someone who’d laughed a lot, poked at you, filled any room she was in with her energy. All that was gone.

After brief hellos, she said, ‘Let’s go.’ She motioned for us to go with her.

‘What happened to being here in an hour?’ I said. I tried not to sound too irritated. I don’t think I succeeded.

‘Do you want my help or not?’ Her cheeks were puffed up and bright pink, as if she’d been running.

‘Where are we going?’ Isabel was playing the part of the unruffled partner. She was smiling sweetly.

‘To the Hebrew University. Simon Marcus is expecting you. He’s waiting.’

‘Let’s go then,’ I said.

It took only twenty minutes to reach the Edmund J. Safra Campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was located on the spine of a hill a little to the west of the city centre. The buildings were modern concrete lecture and administration blocks. In between them was dry-looking grass, tall thin cypress trees, short pine trees, and the occasional palm tree.

Talli said Simon Marcus was holding a symposium that lunchtime in one of the teaching labs for his graduate students.

She drove us there in a pale blue beaten-up old Mercedes. She excused its appearance by telling us how badly academics were paid in Israel, and how high their taxes were these days.

We passed a sign for the Manchester teaching lab. Groups of students were hanging around outside the next building. Talli went straight up to the nearest person in one of the little groups and began talking. We waited a few feet away by a concrete bench. She was back with us in a minute.

She threw her hands up in the air. ‘Simon’s not here. It’s not like him, they say. He hasn’t even texted anyone.’ Her eyes rolled.

‘I spoke to him just before I met you. He told me he’d be here.’ She sighed. ‘Something must have happened.’ She looked at me accusingly.

I stared back at her. If something had happened to him she couldn’t blame it on me. On the way here I’d told her about Max Kaiser being burnt to death and about Susan Hunter disappearing. I was starting to regret having said anything.

‘One of the students has gone to look for him. I don’t know what to do after that.’ She waved a hand through the air dismissively, then sat down heavily on the bench.

A few spots of rain fell. Then a downpour started. We all ran.

Talli had parked her car in an underground car park near the sports centre. Once inside the doorway we shook off the rain and walked, squelching, towards the lower floor. As we turned a corner I heard a voice call my name.

I turned.

A young woman with an earnest face and shoulder-length curly black hair, wearing a pink, rain-spotted t-shirt and pale blue jeans was walking fast towards me. She waved, as if she knew me. Isabel was a few paces ahead of me. Talli was even further on. Then she went up to the next floor, the floor the car was on.

‘You’re a long way from home,’ the woman said.

‘I am.’

‘Don’t you remember me?’

‘When did we meet?’ I had a vague memory of her, maybe from the early days in Oxford. We used to get a lot of interns passing through when we first set up the institute.

She bent her head to one side, glancing over my shoulder.

I turned. Isabel was beside me. ‘Hi,’ she said, in a friendly manner. Talli’s car started up with a roar on the floor below. The noise of the engine filled the air.

The girl was backing away. She looked as if she’d expected me to remember something else about her. ‘I have to go,’ she said. She turned and walked away fast.

‘What was that all about?’ said Isabel.

I shrugged. ‘I think I met her in Oxford.’

‘You don’t remember her?’ said Isabel.

‘We get a lot of exchange students who intern at the institute. Some of them send long pleading emails. I stopped reading them. Beresford-Ellis does all that now. Maybe she was hoping for another job.’

Talli’s car was right behind us. She beeped the horn. We got in.

As we drove off the campus I kept an eye out for the girl, but I didn’t see her. Talli’s phone rang. She pulled over to take the call. We were parked in a dangerous place, half blocking a side road leading back into the university.

Within a few seconds I had figured out who she was speaking to. It was Simon Marcus.

Talli spoke in Hebrew, looking at us, gesticulating. Then she went silent. She was listening.

‘You don’t remember that girl?’ whispered Isabel.

‘We used to have a party before the interns left each May. We used to hire a room at the Randolph in Oxford and drink all night. We were asked to leave the last time we did it. Someone let off a fire extinguisher in one of the stairwells. It was a nightmare.’

Isabel shook her head mock-disapprovingly. ‘No wonder you don’t remember people.’

That incident was the real reason we abandoned the intern parties, calming things down after our first years of successes. We’d been lucky no one had sent a picture of the foam on the stairs and people rolling in it to the media. We’d been applying for new research grants that year, and a picture of one of our researchers wielding an extinguisher would not have made good PR.

Talli was talking quickly on the phone. She sounded angry. Then she was listening again.

‘What did Irene think of these parties?’ Isabel asked quizzically.

‘She enjoyed them,’ I said. ‘But that was ten years ago.’

Isabel looked away.

She’d told me early on that an old boyfriend used to drink himself into oblivion. She’d finished with him when he’d refused to give up.

She was very different to Irene. Irene and I had enjoyed occasional benders right up until she died.

After that, grief had taken away any desire to get drunk. Drinking brought back too many memories.

Talli had finished her call. She was putting the car back into gear.

‘What did he say?’ I asked.

‘We’re to meet him in half an hour at a cafe.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘I’ll let him tell you himself.’

Twenty minutes later we were at a small Armenian cafe near the Jaffa Gate. The Jaffa Gate was history come to life. It had originally been built by Herod the Great in the early Roman era. Beside it was a gap in the old city wall, which cars could drive through. The gap had been made in 1898 to allow the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, to drive into the Old City.

On either side of the gate the crenulated city wall ran away left and right.

When General Allenby took Jerusalem in 1917, recovering the city from Islam after seven hundred years under its control, he entered the city on foot, through the original arched Jaffa Gate.

The gate is to the west of the warren of flat-roofed, sand-coloured buildings and alleys which make up the Old City. Once inside, to the right is the Armenian quarter, to the left the Christian quarter and straight on, the Muslim and Jewish quarters.

The road for cars curved to the right beyond the gate and there was a small paved area on the left lined with shops and cafes. These buildings were all three and four-storey high Ottoman-style shops with tall windows, rooftop balconies and arched entranceways. Plastic signs, canopies, and racks of postcards lined the pavement in front of the cafes, tourist offices and money changers.

‘I’ll have the lamb kebabs and a coke,’ said Isabel to the white-shirted waiter who hovered over us. I ordered the same, with a coffee. Talli just ordered coffee.

‘I hope he doesn’t let us down again,’ she said.

‘Let’s enjoy our lunch, whatever happens,’ said Isabel. ‘We don’t get lunch in Jerusalem every week.’

‘What do you do, Isabel?’ Talli asked.

Isabel spent the next few minutes telling Talli about the low-level job she used to work at in the British Consulate in Istanbul. I think she overplays all that. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who makes their previous job out to be so lacklustre. Talli’s eyebrows kept going up as Isabel described rescuing drunken businessmen from the wrong bars near Taksim Square.

Beyond the window of the cafe, I watched people walking up from the gap in the Old City wall. Three policemen were talking to each other by a set of concrete bollards near a taxi rank on the far side of the road.