The Jerusalem Puzzle Read Online Free PDF

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