"George Langelaan - The Fly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langelaan George)

she was mad. That being the case, there was of course no trial.
My brother's wife never tried to defend herself in any way and even got quite
annoyed when she realized that people thought her mad, and this of course was
considered proof that she was indeed mad. She owned up to the murder of her
husband and proved easily that she knew how to handle the hammer; but she would
never say why, exactly how, or under what circumstances she had killed my brother.
The great mystery was how and why had my brother so obligingly stuck his head
under the hammer, the only possible explanation for his part in the drama.
The night watchman had heard the hammer all right; he had even heard it twice, he
claimed. This was very strange, and the stroke-counter which was always set back to
naught after a job, seemed to prove him right, since it marked the figure two. Also,
the foreman in charge of the hammer confirmed that after cleaning up the day before
the murder, he had as usual turned the stroke-counter back to naught. In spite of
this, Helene maintained that she had only used the hammer once, and this seemed
just another proof of her insanity.
Commissaire Charas, who had been put in charge of the case, at first wondered if
the victim were really my brother. But of that there was no possible doubt, if only
because of the great scar running from his knee to his thigh, the result of a shell that
had landed within a few feet of him during the retreat in 1940; and there were also the
fingerprints of his left hand which corresponded to those found all over his
laboratory and his personal belongings up at the house.
A guard had been put on his laboratory and the next day half-a-dozen officials came
down from the Air Ministry. They went through all his papers and took away some
of his instruments, but before leaving, they told the Commissaire that the most
interesting documents and instruments had been destroyed.
The Lyons police laboratory, one of the most famous in the world, reported that
Andre's head had been wrapped up in a piece of velvet when it was crushed by the
hammer, and one day Commissaire Charas showed me a tattered drapery which I
immediately recognized as the brown velvet cloth I had seen on a table in my
brother's laboratory, the one on which his meals were served when he could not
leave his work.
After only a very few days in prison, Helene had been transferred to a nearby
asylum, one of the three in France where insane criminals are taken care of. My
nephew Henri, a boy of six, the very image of his father, was entrusted to me, and
eventually all legal arrangements were made for me to become his guardian and tutor.
Helene, one of the quietest patients of the asylum, was allowed visitors and I went to
see her on Sundays. Once or twice the Commissaire had accompanied me and, later,
I learned that he had also visited Helene alone. But we were never able to obtain any
information from my sister-in-law, who seemed to have become utterly indifferent.
She rarely answered my questions and hardly ever those of the Commissaire. She
spent a lot of her time sewing, but her favorite pastime seemed to be catching flies,
which she invariably released unharmed after having examined them carefully.
Helene only had one fit of raving тАУ more like a nervous breakdown than a fit, said the
doctor who had administered morphia to quieten her тАУ the day she saw a nurse
swatting flies.
The day after Helene's one and only fit, Commissaire Charas came to see me.
"I have a strange feeling that there lies the key to the whole business, Monsieur
Delambre," he said.
I did not ask him how it was that he already knew all about Helene's fit.
"I do not follow you, Commissaire. Poor Madame Delambre could have shown an