Free The Way Through The Woods by Colin Dexter Page A

Max Gate and Talbothays towards Wool. As he was driving through Moreton, he wondered whether there was any follow-up to the Phillipson analysis (there had been no mention in:he Tuesday or Wednesday editions), and he stopped and bought ihe last copy of The Times from the village newsagent's. The answer was yes – yes, there was; and he sat for a while in the sunshine beside the wall of the cemetery containing the grave of Lawrence of Arabia, reading the long letter which (as with succeeding letters) now found its place naturally in the newspaper's correspondence columns:
     
    From Professor (Emeritus) Rene Gray
    Sir, My mind, doubtless like the minds of many of your regular
    readers, has been much exercised these past few days following the publication (July 3) of the letter received by the Thames Valley Police. I beg the courtesy of your columns to make one or two observations.
    This is not a poem by Alfred Austin, though the words 'A. Austin' appear beneath it. The name 'Austin' does not seem to refer to a make of motor car: 'A'-registration Austins date from 1983-84, and there is no resemblance between this date and those given in brackets. The dates given are not Austin the poet's dates. He was born in 1835, and died in 1913. There is a remote possibility that the last two digits of his birth-date have been transposed for some reason, but the death-date is plainly wrong. Dying in 1913, he was 78 years old at the time of his death. By a strange coincidence the transposition of these digits gives us the '87' which is written here. I conclude that the dates are not all they seem, and most likely constitute the key to the cypher.
    The figures do not appear to give geographical co-ordinates. They do not match the format of Ordnance Survey co-ordinates, and they are not co-ordinates of latitude and longitude, since Great Britain lies between the 50th and 6oth lines of latitude and between the longitudes 2°E and 10°W. We are left with six digits which somehow must give the clue to the interpretation of the words of the message.
    I have not been able to work out the cypher. I have tried the first word, followed by the eighth, followed by the fifth after that (giving either 'Find… my… the… skylit', or 'Find… frosted… skylit… me'). I have re-transposed the sequences of digits, to no better effect. I have tried lines, first words of lines, last words of line. I have taken the digits in pairs, i.e. as 18, 53 (or 35) and 87 with the same result. I have alternated the beginnings of the lines with the ends of the lines, and vice versa.
    I have simplified the expression '1853-87' by interpreting the hyphen as a minus sign. The answer, '1766', does not produce any happier result. The only sensible word- produced is yielded by taking letters in that sequence in the first line, thus giving 'F-i-s-h', but the message does not continue. (A red herring, possibly!)
    There are a large number of other combinations and permutations, but no method other than trial and error for seeing whether any make any sense.
    The overriding advantage of the mechanical method of deciphering is that the poem itself does not have to make sense; a random sequence of words would fulfil exactly the same purpose of concealing the message. Hence odd words such as 'tiger' need not fall into the category of important words at all: in its place, 'chairman' or 'post-box' would do equally well; these words meet the requirements of the metre, but would not be included in the deciphered message. Likewise, the upper case 'T' in the middle of line 13 is not significant. The fact that the poem does make some kind of sense in places thus merely adds to the bafflement.
    If this line of thinking is correct, it does not matter what the poem says, or what it means. What is needed is the services of a skilled cryptographer.
     
    Yours faithfully,
    RENE GRAY,
     
    136 Victoria Park Road,
    Leicester.
     
    Mosre read the letter once only, and decided to wait until his return