To be in order, I called in a solicitor named Price whom I knew, and a week after Massari’s death we opened his portmanteaux together and examined the contents.
They presented several surprises. Sammy was, of course, with us, taking an eager interest in the affair and helping to examine the documents which we found. He was of little use, however, for they were mostly in Italian, a language of which both my companions were almost entirely ignorant.
The first fact I established was that the name of the deceased was not Massari but Giovanni Nardini. This surprised us all, for Nardini was very well-known in Italy, having held the portfolio of Justice in the Ministry overthrown only a week before, and having made himself conspicuous in his perpetual war with the Socialist party in the Chamber. Only two days ago I had read telegrams from Rome in the morning papers saying that there were serious charges against the Minister of appropriating the public funds while in office, and that the Government were considering what steps they should take for his prosecution.
I had never connected the notorious Minister of Justice Nardini with the stranger who had died so suddenly. Yet had not Lucie Miller told me that he was a person well-known in Italy?
“He was a thief who absconded, that’s very evident,” Sammy remarked dryly. “We shall perhaps find something interesting presently.”
The lawyer Price and myself were seated at the table in the room where the ex-Minister had died, and we both carefully examined paper after paper, I reading aloud a rough translation.
Many of the documents were, I recognised, of extreme importance to the Government. Some were the official records of sentences pronounced by the Tribunal upon various persons and had evidently been extracted from the archives of the Ministry.
“I wonder what he intended to do with these?” Price remarked presently. “Perhaps his idea was to sell them to the persons who had been condemned to enable them to destroy the record.”
“Or perhaps he held them for the purposes of levying blackmail?” Sammy suggested. “No man, if he were leading an honest life, would like to have his police record hawked about.”
“But here,” I said, holding up a paper, “here are the confidential notes of the President of the Court of Assizes at Milan concerning two very important cases, showing the lines on which the prosecution was to be conducted. These would surely be of the utmost value to the prisoners, for upon them they could form a complete defence. The prosecution is a political one, and the weak points in the evidence are indicated and commented upon. Yes,” I added, “all these official documents have been carried off because they could easily be turned into money. We shall be compelled to restore them to the Italian Government.”