Morse was the last to read the letter, his face betraying some slight puzzlement — as Ullman produced a ticket for the following Friday’s performance.
£40!
Phew!
“Is it genuine?” queried Stockman.
“ ‘Ring-side’ seat, if you see what I mean,” replied Ullman.
Morse smiled gently at the little man’s pleasantry as he held the ticket up to the light and pretended to be checking a possible irregularity of watermark.
“Genuine enough, I reckon,” he said, wishing dearly that the ticket was his own.
Beer glasses were empty again now, and Morse decided that it was either him or Stockman for the next round.
Let it be Stockman!
The back bar was a popular venue — ill-designed, intimate, awkward — and was now almost full this mid-lunchtime as Morse excused his premature departure and carefully squeezed his way past the woman to his right. Apparently she had been paying more attention to Ullman than to her crossword puzzle, for as far as Morse could see she had made very Little, if any, progress.
And indeed Morse was right. Like most of the other customers there she had been very interested in Ullman’s tale; interested in one or two other things as well. Had anyone apart from herself, for example, noticed that Morse (inadvertently?) had forgotten to hand back to Ullman the letter from the car thief? Had anyone apart from herself observed the conspiratorial exchange of glances between the two of them — between the man the others called Morse and Ullman himself? “Conspiratorial”? No, that was too strong a word for it, perhaps. But something like that had been there. She could have sworn it.
Interesting!
There was something else too. After Morse had left, the little man’s eyes had caught hers — almost as if she might have been a vague acquaintance. Not that she was: she’d never seen him in her life before. But she thought there’d been something almost... sinister about his look. “Sinister”? Yes, that wasn’t too strong a word for it. It was as if he knew something about her that she hardly knew herself.
Morse sauntered around Blackwell’s for half an hour before walking over to the bus stop in Cornmarket. On the ride back to Kidlington he read the letter twice more, reflecting yet again on the bizarre coincidence that a car thief — a car thief! — should share his own highly idiosyncratic view about the greatest opera ever composed... Reflecting also on just those two (forgivable?) lapses in English grammar; and on that one (wholly unforgivable!) lapse which still puzzled Morse sorely as he walked up the incline to Police HQ.
“Nice, er, lunch, sir?” Lewis broke off his typing and looked down at his wrist-watch.
“Shut up and listen! Chap has his car pinched — OK? Few days later it’s returned, in better nick than when it was pinched — with a note saying very sorry but I had to have a car and to make up for all the trouble here’s an expensive ticket for the opera. You with me?”
Lewis nodded.
“So this chap goes along to the opera and when he gets back home—”
“He finds he’s been burgled,” said Lewis flatly.
“You been sleeping in the knife-box?”
“No. Heard of it before, sir. There was a case like that a few weeks ago out in High Wycombe — so one of the lads was saying.”
“Oh!”
“Sorry to disappoint you, sir.”
“You think many other people have heard of it?”
“Doubt it. Not the sort of thing you want broadcasting, is it? I mean, you’d probably get lots of copy-cat crimes. For a start anyway.”
“Mm.”
“Clever though.”
“Bloody clever!”
“Why did you mention it, sir?”
Morse grinned. “What are you doing Friday evening?”
“Not sure. The wife’s got a Tupperware party, I think, but—”
“Would you be glad to get away?”
It was Lewis’s turn to grin. “What time do you want me?”
It was at one minute past seven, from the front seats of a white Self Hire van, that the pair of them saw the man leave his property and walk briskly away.
“You’re a very clever bugger to think of this, you know, Millie!”
“Don’t count your chickens — not yet.”
“No — plenty o’ time.”
“Three and a half hours — Christ!”
“More’n two football matches.”
“You’re a philistine, Charlie!”
“What me? Don’t be daft. Wagner’s me greatest passion in life, didna tell yer?”
It was from their unmarked car that Morse and Lewis observed Ullman leave on foot. With a new alarm system fitted, and with a stout Krooklok fixed between steering-wheel and clutch, the Metro was now safely housed in the bolted garage. Clearly Ullman was taking no further risks; and in any case, buses were fairly frequent down the Banbury Road — down to the City Centre — down to the Apollo Theatre.
At half-past eight, Lewis ventured his first criticism:
“What time do you say this thing started?”
“Give ’em a chance, Lewis! They’ve got till midnight, near as dammit.”
“But we’ve already been here—”
“Ssshhh!” hissed Morse as a strong-bodied woman walked up the gravel drive to Ullman’s front door, looked around with some interest — before pushing what appeared to be a free newspaper into the letter-box; then retracing her steps, and closing the gate to the drive behind her.
“Exciting little incident, wouldn’t you say, sir?” asked Lewis wearily.
But Morse refused to rise to the bait.
At ten minutes past nine, a man opened the drive gate, closed it behind him, and walked up to the front door, where he looked over his shoulder for a good many seconds as if almost expecting to see someone, before extracting the newspaper from the letter-box, finding a key, and entering the house.
Dr. Eric Ullman.
Morse was still shaking his head a quarter of an hour later when Lewis came back from the bar at the Dew Drop in Summertown with a pint of Best Bitter, and half a glass of Beamish.
“He might just have got fed up with it, sir? Not everybody’s cup o’ tea — Wagner.”
“It’s his cup o’ tea though: that’s the whole point. No, there’s something very wrong somewhere, I’m sure of it, Lewis. They must’ve known he’d come back early... They must have got wind of it somehow.”
“Perhaps Dr. Ullman guessed — well, what you guessed, sir?”
“Ye-es! Do you know, I think you may be right.” Morse took out the letter yet again. “You see, whoever wrote this says he’s a great Wagner fan, agreed?”
“Like you.”
“Like me, yes. But I don’t believe him. Look!” Morse jabbed a forefinger at two words in the letter: “Die Valkurie.”
Lewis looked appropriately vague. “All German to me, sir.”
Morse tried to smile. “Oh no, Lewis! That, if I may say so, is precisely the point. It isn’t German! If you spend your life with anything — if you read about it — if you think about it — if you play it time and time again—”