The Sudoku Inheritance

Part I - Foreplay

I logged into the website of the manufacturer of the bank's database software. Using my privileged access codes, I soon found the release notes for version four-point-three. Release notes tell technicians like me about glitches that have been found, which are not documented in the official instruction manuals. The notes looked fine until they mentioned a few optional features that the clients may or may not want to install. This is often the cause of many problems as it is genuinely impossible to test all the various combinations of options that clients may or may not use. 

"That can't be right," I murmured to myself. A quick chat-room session with their technical support guys confirmed it. The label on the tin was wrong. 

"Jim?" I realised I hadn't spoken to him for several minutes but he was still there. "Re-apply patches two-four-seven-point-one and two-nine-three-point-six, in that order, not the other way around like the manual says." A patch was a small, hastily-written program written to fix a bug, rather like sticking a plaster on a wound. "Then recompile all the queries again, to be on the safe side. And up the buffers to five meg for the hell of it." Anyone listening in to our conversation would imagine it was a foreign language. 

This operation would take Jim's team about fifteen minutes to organise and execute. For just a few of those minutes, the credit card system would be unavailable to paying customers. Punters would not be amused.  

"Management aren't going to like this one little bit, Nathan. There must be another way." 

"There isn't. Trust me." 

"OK, we're on it." 

If only all problems were that easy to solve. 

Chapter 6.  

While Jim obtained the necessary permission from his management hierarchy, I returned to my quest for permission to Jasmine's heart. If not her heart then at least the rest of her body. 

The gifted kings of east have all gone 

Enid made them famous now she's done 

First it was gods, now it's kings. The riddles had obviously been compiled by a historian or bible-basher.  

Of course! We three kings of Orient are, bearing gifts we travel afar, I sang as best as my monotonic broken voice allowed. OK, now we're getting somewhere. But who's Enid? She sounded old - probably small and granny-like, with grey hair held in a tight bun, wearing round-rimmed spectacles and busy with knitting.

Rent a house on old kent road 

Date of juno gold sword 

Old Kent Road - is that the A2? Blackheath, Dartford way? I don't know London all that well, in fact, I try to avoid it, especially at night. Too many weirdos. You never know who you might pull in a club. As for gold swords?

Olive trees by heaven's gate 

Love letters written in hate 

Nice rhyming, I thought. A small smiley figure had been drawn alongside this one. I guessed Jasmine knew the answer, which was one up on me at this stage. A quick scan of the page showed that this was the only smiley. I'd never written a love letter, the sort you write on scented paper with SWALK across the envelope. It's all emails and texts now. Besides, with one-night stands you don't need them. I did receive one once from the fat girl in form three with the National Health specs - I ripped it up.  

I had thought the first question about gods was hard, these others were... impossible. I recalled the footnote saying where there's a will there's a way which presumably meant that the clues were hard but possible. Well, I love a challenge and I'm a pretty tenacious guy but this was a whole new definition of possible in my book.