The Last Secret Of The Temple (36 page)

The Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre, a nondescript cluster of yellow and white stone buildings shaded by trees and hemmed in by a low perimeter fence, sits on a steep rise at the north-western fringe of Jerusalem, at the point where the city's outskirts start to stutter and fragment, segueing into the bulging, pine-clad slopes of the Judean Hills. Ben-Roi arrived late in the afternoon and, after parking up outside the main gate, walked across to the security cabin and informed the guard inside that he had an appointment to see one of the patients. A call was put through to another part of the compound, and three minutes later a plump, middle-aged woman in a white doctor's coat arrived, introducing herself as Dr Gilda Nissim and escorting him out of the cabin and up into the hospital grounds.

Coming here was, if not exactly an act of desperation for Ben-Roi, at least the last obvious line of enquiry left open to him at this juncture. Despite working right through the previous night and all that day he had singularly failed to establish any link whatsoever between Piet Jansen and Hannah Schlegel. Sure, he'd unearthed a few extra details about Schlegel's past: the precise dates of her internment in Auschwitz; the fact that she and her brother had been transported to the camp from Recebedou, a transit centre in southern France. But the information was way too fragmentary to formulate anything approaching a clear picture of the victim's life, let alone explain why Piet Jansen, or anyone else for that matter, should have wanted to murder her.

There had been just one faint glimmer of light and that had come from a visit to the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem, where Schlegel had been employed part-time as an archivist. According to one of her former colleagues her work there had involved basic filing, indexing and assistance with simple research queries – general stuff, nothing out of the ordinary. At the same time – and it was this that had given Ben-Roi pause – she had also, apparently, been engaged in some sort of private research of her own. Exactly what this research entailed the former colleague hadn't been able to say. He did think, however, that it was in some way connected with Dachau, since on a number of occasions he had come across Schlegel poring over records and survivor testimonies from that particular concentration camp. Mrs Weinberg, Schlegel's former neighbour, had also mentioned seeing her with files on Dachau, while Majdi, the guy who had burnt out her home, had described how the flat was full of papers and documents 'like some sort of archive'. There was, the detective felt certain, some significance to all of this, some way in which Schlegel's 'private research' tied in with her murder and with Piet Jansen. He had been unable to clarify the connection, however, and in the end had been forced to concede that, while it was clearly an important line of enquiry, it also seemed to be a hopeless one.

Which left him with Isaac Schlegel, the dead woman's twin brother. And from everything Ben-Roi had heard, he was a complete fruitcake.

'I've been told Mr Schlegel's pretty screwed up,' he said as he and Dr Nissim climbed through the hospital grounds, following a steep tarmaced road past scattered stone buildings interspersed with terraces of flowers and pine and cypress trees.

She shot him a faintly disapproving look.

'He's extremely disturbed, if that's what you mean,' she replied. 'He was already suffering from acute post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his wartime experiences, and then when his sister died . . . well, it pretty much pushed him over the edge. They were very close. I shouldn't expect too much from him. This way.'

They angled left around a fenced enclosure in which two overweight men in pyjamas were playing table-tennis before coming to a modern, single-storey, white-stone block with a sign outside announcing NORTH WING PSYCHOGERIATRIC CENTRE. She ushered him through the glass entrance and along a deserted, softly lit corridor, a vague smell of cleaning fluid and boiled vegetables in the air, everything silent aside from the hum of the air-conditioning and, from a room somewhere ahead of them, the muffled sound of a man's voice wailing, shouting something about Saul and Zedekiah and the Day of Judgement. Ben-Roi shot the doctor a glance.

'That's not . . . ?'

'Mr Schlegel?' She gave a humourless grunt. 'Don't worry. Isaac has many problems, but fantasizing that he's some Old Testament prophet isn't one of them. Besides, he's barely spoken a single word these last fifteen years.'

They stopped in front of a door near the far end of the corridor. Nissim gave a gentle knock, then opened it, putting her head through into the room beyond.

'Hello, Isaac,' she said, her tone soft, soothing. 'I've brought you a visitor. There's no need to be afraid. He's just going to ask you some questions. Is that OK?'

If there was any answer, Ben-Roi didn't hear it.

'You can have twenty minutes,' she said, withdrawing into the corridor. 'I'll come and fetch you when the time's up. And remember, this isn't a police station, so go easy on him. Yes?'

She held the detective's eye for a moment, then, with a curt nod, set off back the way they had come, her plimsolled feet squeaking on the smooth marble floor. Ben-Roi hesitated, uncertain what to expect, uncomfortable – he had always hated these sort of places, their blank, characterless sterility, the soporific atmosphere, as though the air itself was drugged – then stepped through the door and pushed it to behind him.

He was in a bright, sun-filled room, very sparse, with a bed, a table and, taped all over the walls, covering them from ceiling to floor like badly pasted wallpaper, dozens upon dozens of crayon drawings, very simple, like something you might find in a children's nursery. Schlegel was sitting opposite, in an armchair beside the window, a frail, haggard-looking man wearing pale green pyjamas and carpet slippers. He was staring fixedly at the rockery outside, a book clutched in his bony hands, its green cover creased and dog-eared.

'Mr Schlegel?'

The old man didn't respond. Ben-Roi hovered for a moment, then, picking up a wooden stool, crossed the room and sat down in front of him.

'Mr Schlegel,' he repeated, trying to keep his voice soft, unthreatening. 'My name is Arieh Ben-Roi. I'm with the Jerusalem Police. I wanted to ask you some questions. About your sister, Hannah.'

The man didn't even seem to register his presence, just continued staring out of the window, his eyes sunken and blank.

'I know this is difficult for you,' pressed the detective, 'but I need your help. I'm trying to catch the man who killed your sister, you see. Will you help me, Mr Schlegel? Will you answer some questions? Please?'

Nothing. No acknowledgement, no reaction, no answer, just that blank, catatonic stare, glazed and expressionless, like a fish gazing up from a monger's slab.

'Please, Mr Schlegel?'

Still nothing.

'Can you hear me, Mr Schlegel?'

Silence.

'Mr Schlegel?'

Silence.

'For fuck's sake.'

Ben-Roi brought his hands up and cracked the knuckles behind his head, at a loss. If he'd been interrogating a criminal suspect he would have pushed and harried, threatened, demanded information; but, like the doctor said, this wasn't a police station, and he couldn't employ police-station methods.

Several minutes passed, the two of them just sitting there in silence like a pair of chess players; then, accepting that conversation seemed to be futile, Ben-Roi stood up and wandered across the room, running his eyes back and forth over the crayon drawings taped to the walls. There must have been close on a hundred of the things, and initially he didn't take much notice what each one was specifically depicting, just glanced this way and that, not particularly interested, assuming them to be no more than the random outpourings of a damaged mind. Only gradually did it dawn on him that, childish as they were, clumsy-handed scrawls that any five-year-old could have produced, the pictures were perhaps not quite as disconnected as he had at first thought. On the contrary, taken together they actually seemed to form some sort of meandering, mural-like narrative.

He slowed his eyes, focusing on a drawing beside the door. There was a boat with a funnel, undulating blue lines denoting waves, and, standing on the boat's prow, two stick-like figures with joined hands. The next two pictures depicted almost exactly the same scene, but then came one in which the two figures, still hand in hand, seemed to be suspended in mid-air in front of the prow, as if jumping into the sea. He recalled the story Mrs Weinberg had told about how Schlegel and her brother had been forced to swim ashore after the boat in which they had travelled to Palestine had been turned back at Haifa by the British, and with a sudden electric jolt he realized it was exactly this scene that the picture was showing.

'It's his life,' he whispered to himself.

He wheeled round.

'It's your life, isn't it? It's the story of your life.'

He spun round again and picked up the narrative, following it first forward through time, then back, slowly revolving as his eyes hopped from picture to picture, up and down and around the walls, piecing together the story.

Many of the images corresponded with things he had already found out about Hannah Schlegel's life. On the wall above the bed, for instance, among the last pictures in the collection, were three depicting a small stick figure being beaten on the head by another, much larger figure, against a yellow, desertlike background – presumably a reference to her murder in Egypt. Likewise, a whole block of pictures around the door, more than twenty of them in total, all in black or grey, were unambiguous portrayals of the horrors of Auschwitz – a smoking chimney, loops of barbed wire, six bodies hanging from a gibbet and, horrific in its simplicity, two stick figures strapped onto beds, zig-zags of red-crayoned blood issuing from their groins, slashes of black bursting from their mouths in what Ben-Roi took to be a depiction of agonized wailing.

Other pictures were less easy to interpret. The very first image in the narrative, for instance, was of a large pink house with a bright sun rising behind it and four faces peering out of separate windows, all with wide, curving smiles. Was this a recollection of Schlegel's early life, he wondered? The brother and sister at home with their parents, before their world fell apart? Or did it have some other, wholly different meaning?

Similarly, interspersed at regular intervals throughout the collection, like a recurring motif, a refrain within a song or poem, were a series of images of a seven-branched menorah in bright yellow crayon. An allusion to the artist's faith and heritage, perhaps? Or was it simply a shape that for whatever reason the old man found soothing? It just wasn't clear.

One group of pictures in particular held Ben-Roi's attention, mainly because they seemed to chart some sort of transition between the childish optimism of the first few pictures, which were drawn in bright, cheerful colours, and the darker, more melancholy shades of the rest of the collection. There were four of them in total, all featuring the same arched door or gateway, very tall and narrow, its sides wound round with coiling tentacles of green ivy. The first in the group showed two stick figures, presumably Schlegel and his sister, standing in the centre of the gateway, holding hands and smiling. The next depicted almost exactly the same scene, save that the figures were now hidden behind some sort of bush, watching as another group of figures hacked at the ground in front of the gateway with pickaxes. The sequence was then broken by the first of the menorahs that were to recur throughout the collection before resuming with an image of Schlegel and his sister apparently running away from the gateway, pursued by the figures with pickaxes. The final picture in the sequence showed a malevolent, giantlike creature with fierce red eyes clutching the two smaller figures, one in each hand. Their smiles had gone, replaced by the arcing black parabolas of terror and distress.

The more Ben-Roi looked at them the more something inside him – a gut instinct, a bellyache – told him that of all the drawings in the collection they were somehow the most significant, the moment when everything started to go wrong for Isaac and Hannah Schlegel, and thus, in some unspecified way, the key to Hannah's subsequent life and death. He stared at them for a long while, eyes taking in every nuance and crayon stroke; then, turning, he went back to his stool and sat down again.

'Mr Schlegel,' he said, 'can you tell me about the pictures over there by the table? The pictures with the arch.'

He asked the question more for the sake of it than in any hope that he'd actually get an answer. To his surprise, Schlegel slowly revolved his eyes away from the window, turning his gaze first on Ben-Roi, then down to the book in his lap, then up at Ben-Roi again. The detective scraped his stool forward a couple of inches so that his knees were almost touching those of the old man.

'They're important, aren't they?' he pushed, trying to keep his voice calm and slow, like someone tip-toeing towards an injured bird, doing their utmost not to startle or distress it. 'They're when bad things started to happen to you and your sister. They're the reason your sister was murdered.'

It was a guess, this last statement, a long-shot, but it obviously struck a chord, for the old man blinked and, as if in slow motion, a single crystalline tear welled in his left eye, teetering like a tightrope walker on the cusp of his lower lid before dropping down onto the cheek below.

'What happened at the arch?' asked Ben-Roi softly. 'Who are the people with the pickaxes?'

Again Schlegel dropped his gaze to the book, then lifted it, his pupils moist and grey, a misty, faraway look in his eyes as though he was gazing not at something within the room but rather at a place far removed in both space and time.

'Please, Isaac. What happened at the arch? Who's the giant with the red eyes?'

The old man did not respond, just stared into the distance, humming softly to himself, one hand caressing the book in his lap. Ben-Roi tried to hold him, to keep him in the present, but it was no good; after that brief fragile spark of connection the old man had once again disappeared into his own world, drifting away like a pebble slowly sinking out of sight into the depths of a deep, dark lake. The detective questioned him a while longer, then, acknowledging it was a waste of time, that the moment had passed, he sighed, sat back and looked at his watch. His twenty minutes were almost up. As if on cue there was a distant squeak of approaching feet in the corridor outside.