Meadows returned as they were gathering together the scattered sheets. There were hundreds of them, all written in Braille characters, and Manfred’s sensitive fingers were skimming their surface.
“Oh, yes,” he said, in answer to a question that was put to him, “I knew Lee was blind, the day we searched Barberton’s effects. That was my mystery.” He laughed. “Barberton expected a call from his old friend and had left a message for him on the mantelpiece. Do you remember that strip of paper? It ran: ‘Dear Johnny, I will be back in an hour.’ These are letters,”—he indicated the papers.
“The folds tell me that,” said Meadows. “You may not get a conviction against Cuccini; the two burglars will come up before a judge, but to charge Cuccini means the whole story of the snake coming out, and that means a bigger kick than I’m prepared to laugh away—I am inclined to let Cuccini go for the moment.”
Manfred nodded. He sat with the embossed sheets on his knee.
“Written from various places,” he went on.
It was curious to see him, his fingers running swiftly along the embossed lines, his eyes fixed on vacancy.
“So far I’ve learnt nothing, except that in his spare time Barberton amused himself by translating native fairy stories into English and putting them into Braille for use in the blind school. I knew, of course, that he did that, because I’d already interviewed his sister, who is the mistress of the girls’ section.”
He had gone through half a dozen letters when he rose from the table and walked across to the safe.
“I have a notion that the thing we’re seeking is not here,” he said. “It is hardly likely that he would allow a communication of that character to be jumbled up with the rest of the correspondence.”
The safe door was open and the steel drawer at the back had been pulled out. Evidently it was from this receptacle that the letters had been taken. Now the drawer was empty. Manfred took it out and measured the depth of it with his finger.