“’Tis for all of us, I’m thinking,” he said. “Listen!
“‘My dear McCarty. It has been a pleasure to meet such a man as you and we part with regret, at least on my side. You are quite correct in your deductions as far as you have expounded them and I regret that I cannot wait to hear you reconstruct your complete case but time presses. The last drawer of this desk at which I write has a false bottom; remove it and you will find a portion of my diary for the past fortnight, placed there in readiness for this eventuality. I bequeath it to you for your further information and in most sincere admiration, for where I go I may take nothing material with me, although I shall not leave my body behind. I am not going to death but to annihilation. Checkmate!
“‘Henry Orbit.’”
“What does he mean?” the inspector demanded. “What kind of an escape has he planned? Not take his body with him and yet not leave it behind? What’s that about ‘annihilation’?”
“We may know for ourselves if we stand here guessing about it instead of stopping him!” McCarty thrust the letter into his pocket and made for the door beyond which the two French servants and the Chinese one had halted. “He’s planned to destroy himself entirely, body and all, and if it’s by blowing the whole house up I’d not be surprised! Come on!”
The others hurried after him but in the hall he paused to confront Ching Lee.
“’Twas the man you worked for, Orbit, who was the murderer!” he announced. “You knew that, though; you suspected it from the first, after the queer way Hughes took sick from drinking the medicine Orbit mixed for him before dinner! That’s why you went next morning dressed like a Chinese laborer down to the quarter where Hughes died, to get what dope you could about it! If you don’t want to get pinched for being accessory, you come clean! Which way did he go just now?”
“I did not see.” Ching Lee’s face had betrayed no slightest flicker of emotion and his tone was perfectly composed. “I came upstairs only when the shouts and the odor of smoke led me to think that the house was on fire. I saw no one, nothing.”
“Where is his laboratory? Where is it that he locks himself away sometimes, a place that none of the rest of you enters?” McCarty rapped out the questions like shots from an automatic. “There’s not a minute to spare! Is it upstairs or down?”
Ching Lee was silent, but Jean with chattering teeth spoke up suddenly: