Free The Jerusalem Puzzle by Laurence O’Bryan Page A

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 I’d been brought up a Catholic, but there were one too many scandals, and all the outdated rules had put me off.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.

17
    ‘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