The Way Through The Woods Read Online Free PDF Page B

lose them. And of course some of them run away. But we've always thought of this as a case of potential murder.'
    At the time of her disappearance, Miss Eriksson's mother informed the police that Karin had phoned her from London a week or so previously, sounding 'brisk and optimistic', albeit rather short of cash. And the Principal of the secretarial college where Karin was a student described her as 'an attractive, able, and athletic young lady'. Since the discovery of the rucksack, no trace whatever has
    been found, although senior police officers were last night suggesting that this new development might throw fresh light on one or two possible clues discovered during the earlier investigation.
    The poem in full reads as follows:
Find me, find the Swedish daughter –
Thaw my frosted tegument!
Dry the azured skylit water,
Sky my everlasting tent.

Who spied, who spied that awful spot?
find me! Find the woodman's daughter!
Ask the stream: 'Why tell'st me not
The truth thou know'st – the tragic slaughter?'

Ask the tiger, ask the sun
Whither riding, what my plight?
Till the given day be run,
Till the burning of the night.

Thyme, I saw Thyme flow'ring here
A creature white trapped in a gin,
Panting like a hunted deer
Licking still the bloodied skin.

With clues surveyed so wondrous laden,
Hunt the ground beneath thy feet!
Find me, find me now, thy maiden,
I will kiss thee when we meet.
    A. Austin (1853-87)
     
    The lines were typed on a fairly old-fashioned machine, and police are hopeful that forensic tests may throw up further clues. The only immediately observable idiosyncracies of the typewriter used are the worn top segment of the lower-case ‘e'. and the slight curtailment of the cross-bar in the lower-case 't'. To be truthful,' admitted Chief Inspector Johnson, 'not many of my colleagues here are all that hot on poetry, and that's why we thought The Times might help. It would be a sort of poetic justice if it could.' Final word with Mr Phillipson: 'It might all be a cruel hoax, and the link with the earlier case does appear rather tenuous, perhaps. But the police certainly seem to think they are on to something. So do I!'
     
    Morse read the article at his own pace; then again, rather morel quickly. After which, for several minutes, he sat where he was, his eyes still, his expression quite emotionless – before turning to the back page and reading the clue he hadn't quite been able to see I the evening before:
     
    'Work without hope draws nectar in a -' (Coleridge) (5).
     
    Huh! If the poem was a 'riddle', so was the answer! A quotation from Coleridge, too! Half smiling, he sat back in his chair ancj marvelled once more at the frequency of that extraordinarily common phenomenon called 'coincidence'.
    Had he but known it, however, a far greater coincidence had already occurred the previous evening when (purely by chance surely?) he had been ushered into the dining room to share a table with the delectable occupant of Room 14. But as yet he couldn't I know such a thing; and taking from his pocket his silver Parker pen, he wrote I and 'V in the empty squares which she had left in S-E-E – before reaching for the telephone again.
    'No, sir – Superintendent Strange is still not answering. Can anyone else help?'
    'Yes, perhaps so,' said Morse. 'Put me through to Traffic Control, will you?'

chapter eight
    Extract from a diary dated 2 July 1992 (one day before Morse had found himself in Lyme Regis)
     
    I must write a chapter on 'Gradualism' in my definitive opus on pornography, for it is the gradual nature of the erotic process that is all important, as even that old fascist Plato had the nous to see. Yet this is a factor increasingly forgotten by the writers and the film-directors and the video-makers. If they ever knew it 'Process' is what it should be all about. The process typified in the lifting of a full-length skirt to a point just above the ankle, or the first unfastening of a button on a blouse! Do I make