Most of them were securities, mortgages, bonds, and other such documents, which, at that moment, did not possess much interest for him.
One bundle of old and faded letters which he untied were in a handwriting he at once recognised—the letters of his mother before she had become Lady Remington. Another—a batch written forty years ago—were the letters from his grandfather, while his father was at Oxford. With these were other letters from dead friends and relatives; but, though he spent an hour in searching through them, Raife discovered no clue to the strange secret which Sir Henry had died without divulging.
Then he afterwards replaced the papers, closed the safe and re-locked it with the false key which still remained in it.
His mother was still too prostrated to speak with him, therefore he again went across to the cottage where the police were with the dead assassin.
As he entered, one of the detectives was carefully applying printer’s ink to the tips of the cold, stiff fingers, and afterwards taking impressions of them upon pieces of paper.
The secret of the dead thief’s identity would, they declared among themselves, very soon be known.