“As far as I am concerned,” said the bishop, “I accept your word absolutely. It is a heavy misfortune, especially for you, but there is certainly no blame attaching to you. If I remember rightly the wretched man said something about you just as he left us.”
“Yes,” said Edmund, “‘this is a trap of Captain Ringrose,’ or something of that sort.”
“He always thought that I was against him. I had to watch him, and I often caught him out trying to cheat us.”
“But all this must have happened hours ago, Welfare,” I exclaimed, “why did you wait so long?”
“Why, you see, sir, it took me a long time to get to this end of the passage. When I got to the door I did not know whether the police would be in the house or not. I thought, if I try to get in while they are there we shall all be ruined. So I determined to wait until—well, until I was really afraid I could not afford to bleed any more. But I’ll be all right now. The question is, what are we to do about it?”
“Unless we decide to own up to the whole thing,” Edmund argued, “we shall have to carry him out and leave him under the cliff. They will think he has fallen over in the dark.”
Welfare shook his head slowly.
“That would not do,” he said, “I could not see him in the dark, but there will be no mistake about the marks I have left on his throat. It wouldn’t take a doctor to tell he was strangled. They would be bound to trace back to the passage, and then ask how he got there and who killed him.”
An idea came into my mind, but I forbore to utter it. It seemed to me to come in the guise of temptation; temptation to use this catastrophe to further our own ends.
“We might take a boat and bury him at sea,” Welfare suggested.