Morse’s Greatest Mystery and other stories

Neighbourhood watch

“We must never make the criminal the hero, though!” proclaimed Marcus Price, Fellow of All Souls, as he drained his beer and put down his glass with the gesture of a man announcing to the company that he’d bought the previous round himself and whose turn, pray, was it now.

“What about old Raffles, though? Gentleman-burglar and all that. Remember him?”

The speaker was another Oxford don, Denis Stockman, an authority (the authority) on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth century.

“Stole the Crown Jewels or something,” Stockman continued, “then took ’em back when he found out what they were. No chivalry like that these days, eh, Morse?”

“Oh no,” mumbled Morse.

Oh dear! But Morse had only himself to blame. He’d meant to nip into the King’s Arms just briefly that Wednesday lunchtime; and for a start things had looked promising. The one other customer was a very attractive thirty-odd-year-old brunette with sludgy green eyes. She had smiled momentarily as he’d sat down a few feet from her — before turning her attention back to The Times crossword puzzle, in which even as he took his first draught she wrote another word, with her left hand, the middle fingernail marked with a broad, white lateral line, as if she might have trapped it in a door. Yes, only himself to blame...

Almost as soon as they’d spotted him there they’d pounced. How long is it? Mind if we join you? What are you drinking? Morse should, of course, have pleaded urgency in some criminal pursuit. But he didn’t. The prospect of a further pint gladdened his heart, and he heard himself saying, “Best Bitter.”

It was the fourth member of the quartet who now volunteered to get in the second round of drinks — a small, bald-headed man with a beer-belly and an NHS hearing-aid in his right ear. Morse had met him once or twice before and recalled that he’d been a refugee from pre-war Germany who now lived (very near Morse, wasn’t it?) in a large North Oxford property reputedly stuffed with eminently collectable furniture and ornaments. Yes! Dr. Eric Ullman — that was his name! A bachelor — like Morse.

“Good health, gentlemen!” Ullman’s diction was precise, pedantic almost, as he raised his glass and toasted his two university acquaintances — and the chief inspector. “And please forgive me perhaps if I tell you something — well, something that may surprise you a little?”

If any of the three pairs of eyebrows raised themselves, it was by little more than a millimetre.

“You’re wrong, I think,” began Ullman, “about there being no honour among thieves these days. Please let me explain. Last Friday I went to see Così fan Tutte at the Apollo Theatre here in Oxford. The Welsh National were doing it — doing it this week, too, as you’ll know. I got home at about a quarter past eleven, and most foolishly I didn’t bother to put my car away in the garage. Next morning, when I looked out of the window? The drive was completely empty. The car was gone!”

“Metro, wasn’t it?” asked Price.

Ullman nodded. “I’ve had it for nine years.”

Stockman coughed slightly. “Was it worth pinching, Eric?”

“It was worth a lot to me,” said Ullman simply.

Price grinned. “Three hundred quid — in part exchange? No more.”

“You didn’t hear anything?” asked Morse.

“No. And shall I tell you something else? They’d even closed the gates behind them.”

“Probably pushed it out of the drive,” suggested Morse. “Saves any noise. And you’re only a couple of hundred yards from the Ring Road...”

“I suppose so.”

“Did you ring us? Ring the police?”

“Straightaway. It would probably turn up in three or four days, they said. Out on one of the estates — minus wheels, minus radio, minus anything detachable — panels kicked in — windows smashed...”

“Bloody mind-less, isn’t it!” Price shook his head vehemently. “I know what I’d give some of these young sods — and it wouldn’t be a few gentle hours of community service!”

“Just — just a minute.” Ullman raised his right hand, and the others were silent again. “You see, they didn’t find it out in East Oxford. Oh no. Three days went by, and then on Monday — last Monday — I was invited out to dinner at The Randolph. And when I got back, about eleven or so, there — there in the drive...”

Ullman was telling his little tale well, and three pairs of eyes now betrayed an unexpected interest.

“... completely undamaged — in fact looking very spick-and-span. And under the windscreen wiper — this!”

From his breast-pocket he took out a letter, a letter written in a small, neat, upright script, with no address, no date, no salutation, no valediction; a letter which each of Ullman’s immediate audience now read in turn:

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—”

“Like you.”

“Like me, yes.”

“I’m still not—”

“He can’t even spell the bloody word!”

“We all make the occasional spelling mistake—”

“What? Three spelling mistakes in one word? Three? Come off it! He spells it with a ‘V’ instead of a ‘W’; he sticks a spurious ‘i’ in before the ‘e’; and he misses the umlaut off the ‘u’—”

“The what, sir?”

Morse peeled the back off a beer-mat and wrote out the correct spelling of the opera: “Die Walküre.”

“Ullman’s German though, isn’t he?” asked Lewis slowly.

“German origin, yes.”

“So why... why didn’t he notice, well — what you noticed?”

“I’m beginning to think he did, Lewis. I’m beginning to think he did.”

“But you still felt pretty certain that Dr. Ullman was going to be burgled tonight?”

“If I’d felt all that certain, I’d have had a few heavies round the corner in a police van.”

“Well, at least he’s still got all that valuable furniture of his — that’s one good thing.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“You got anything valuable in the furniture line yourself, sir?”

“Me? Oh, just the one piece, that’s all. The family heirloom — nest of tables — Chippendale — 1756. What about you?”

“Just the big mahogany wardrobe — Utility — 1942. We’ve been trying to give it away this last year but nobody seems to appreciate the quality.”

Lewis drove the two of them back up to North Oxford, where on Morse’s instruction they stopped for a brief while outside Ullman’s residence once again. And even as they watched, the small portly figure of Eric Ullman passed across the uncurtained window of the lighted front room.

“If he’s been burgled tonight, I’m a Dutchman,” volunteered Lewis.

But Lewis was no Dutchman, Morse knew that. “You get off home, Lewis. I’ll walk from here.”

“You sure, sir? It must be all of three hundred yards.”

“Less of the sarcasm, Sergeant!”

“Night, sir.”

Morse had put out his two Co-op semi-skimmed milk tokens, and was pouring himself a touch of the malt — when he suddenly knew that something was terribly wrong. Why hadn’t he spotted the short note on the kitchen table immediately?

Sorry about the inconvenience — very sorry indeed. It was the only thing you’d got worth pinching though and I’m hoping I’ll get a good price.

That was all.

Morse bounded up the stairs, where on the landing he surveyed the empty square of unhoovered carpet upon which, until so very recently, had stood the one objet d’art that had been passed down from one generation of the Morse clan to the next — the family heirloom — the nest of tables — Chippendale — 1756.

It was Sergeant Dixon on night duty. “Thank goodness you’ve rung, sir. We’ve been trying to get you but your phone’s not been answering—”

“I’ve been out, man! You don’t mind, do you?”

“Course not. It’s just that you’ve had burglars, I’m afraid—”

“That’s exactly what I’m ringing to tell you!”

“No need to worry though, sir. They didn’t pinch anything. We’ve caught ’em — the pair of ’em.”

“You’ve done what?”

“You see this fellow rang us and said there was somebody in your flat, but when our boys got there they’d scarpered. This fellow’d got the number though — white Self Hire van — and we stopped it out on the A40 near Wheatley. Just a few old tables in the back — don’t think they could’ve taken anything of yours, sir. They must have got wind of us somehow, I reckon.”

“Who was this fellow?”

“A Dr. Ullman, sir — lives quite near you, so he said.”

Morse was shaking his head yet again as he put down the phone. Everything — almost everything — was becoming clear at long last. The same thought must have struck the two of them, both himself and Ullman, in the King’s Arms that lunchtime; the same strange thought that far from being a gesture of courtesy and gratitude, the letter and the opera ticket were merely the appropriate stages in a subtle strategy of deception.

Yes!

And Morse’s thinking had gone one step further.

And Ullman’s thinking had gone two steps further.

Morse locked his front door very carefully behind him and walked out into the night.

“A wee drop of the malt, Chief Inspector?”

“Excellent!”

“I was hardly expecting you tonight.”

“Did you ever think of joining the police force, Doctor?”

“I’m not tall enough.”

“You were always a move or so ahead of me!”

“Ah! But to be honest with you I did have one little advantage over you. I’ve got a pair of wrens nesting in the front garden, you see, and I was watching them through the field-glasses recently when I noticed a woman, at the bus stop just outside; and I could see that she was watching something, too — watching the house, the drive, the garage... Then two days later I saw her again, and I looked at her very closely through the field-glasses and I could see she was copying something down in a red notebook, writing with her left hand — and I noticed that she had a white scar on the nail of her middle finger, as if she’d trapped it in a door. And then I saw her again, didn’t I...?”

Ullman smiled, and as he did so his features momentarily took on an almost sinister appearance.

“And you felt pretty certain that it was me who was going to get burgled tonight,” said Morse slowly.

“It seemed logical, yes. After all, if you were watching my property, you couldn’t be watching your own as well, now could you?”

“You took a huge risk though.”

“You think so?” The little man appeared puzzled.

“Well, if they burgled you, while you were round at my place watching me...”

“Oh no. I’ve finished taking risks, you see. The private detective I hired to keep a look-out here was the very best in the business, so they told me: black belt at judo, Lord knows what else.”

“He must have been pretty good — we certainly didn’t spot him.”

“Her, Chief Inspector. She said she’d probably do her ‘free-newspaper-delivery’ routine—”

“Bloody ’ell!” mumbled Morse to himself.

“—and I told her she could pack it in for the night just after I’d rung the police — just before I got back here — about nine o’clock.”

“Ten past nine, to be accurate — that’s when we spotted you.”

“Er” — Ullman coughed modestly and drained his malt — “if we’re to be accurate, Chief Inspector, shouldn’t it be when we spotted you?”

For the last time that day Morse shook his head. Then draining his own glass and making his farewell, slowly he walked the three hundred yards back home.