Rites of Spring Anders Motte (classic children's novels txt) 📖

the canal. As if to back up their conclusions, the technicians attached close-ups of the hoof prints in the mud.

Thea leafs through the pages, finds pictures of Svartgården – a collection of gloomy, low buildings surrounded by dense greenery. Then Leo’s little cottage, and the stable. Even Bill in his stall.

Elita’s room seems familiar in many ways. Sloping ceiling, a single bed, an IKEA desk, an armchair and a lamp. If you swap the wooden floor for a fitted carpet and the Duran Duran poster for Wham!, this could have been Thea’s room when she was a teenager.

The letter Elita left behind is on her desk. It has been photographed from several angles, and there is a copy on the next page. Her heart begins to beat a little faster.

Dear readers!

Every narrative must have a beginning, a middle and an end. This is my beginning.

My name is Elita Svart. I am sixteen years old. I live deep in the forest outside Tornaby.

By the time you read this, I will already be dead.

Thea reads on. Elita’s handwriting is rounded, still a little childish. She sometimes uses words and phrases that are too overblown for a sixteen-year-old girl, and her tone becomes rather melodramatic, not least when she writes about herself in the third person.

Sometimes she can seem ironic and manipulative, sometimes more vulnerable, which suggests that she didn’t write the letter all in one go. In certain sentences she is cocky and confident, in others so cryptic that she doesn’t make sense. At times she sounds afraid, especially when she writes about her family and the relationship between her father and Leo.

Leo, who is prepared to do anything for her.

As Thea reads on, she can almost hear Elita’s voice. The voice of a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the middle of a marsh, trapped in a keg of gunpowder, near a village where the inhabitants simultaneously desire and despise her.

Or is it her own voice Thea can hear? Her own sixteen-year-old self who wants to tell the whole world to go to hell?

She carries on reading, gobbling up the words. Elita’s tone becomes darker, her voice clearer and clearer.

Soon I will leave it all behind me, spread my wings and fly away from here. Because no secret is greater than mine.

Thea stops, looks up. What secret? Is Elita referring to the death pact between her and Leo? That seems likely.

Another section captures her interest.

I have chosen them with care, my little tadpoles. Chosen the children whose parents snigger at me behind my back and pull faces when they talk about me, as if my name has a nasty taste.

She leans back on her chair. Repeats the words out loud.

‘The children whose parents snigger at me behind my back.’

She can imagine Ingrid turning up her nose at Elita Svart. A dirty little gyppo, not good enough to associate with her darling David and his friends.

That explains why Elita chose to surround herself with four twelve-year-olds. These weren’t just any children. David’s father was a bank manager, Nettan’s a headmaster, Sebastian’s an engineer. The children, with the possible exception of Jan-Olof, represented the society that rejected her.

Thea reads the rest of the letter, all the way to the highly charged ending.

Who was it, you ask? Who killed Elita Svart?

Why should I tell you?

A tap on the door makes her look up. She quickly closes the file and slips it into a drawer.

‘Come in!’

The door opens to reveal Hubert Gordon. He is wearing his oilskin coat as usual, shaking the rain off his flat cap.

‘Sorry to disturb you.’

‘You’re not disturbing me at all – come on in and sit down.’

Emee leaps to her feet, walks around Hubert a couple of times, then settles with her head on his knee.

‘Thanks for yesterday, by the way,’ Thea says.

‘No, thank you. I’m sorry I didn’t have anything to offer you; I rarely have visitors,’ he says with a small smile.

‘Is there something I can help you with?’

‘Yes; I wonder if you can renew my prescription?’

‘Of course.’

She opens the laptop and asks him for his ID number. His list of medications comes up.

‘Stesolid, is that right?’

‘Yes.’ He clears his throat. ‘I’ve had problems with muscle spasms ever since I was a child. Father had them too, so it’s probably hereditary.’

‘Mm,’ she says, for want of a better response. Stesolid is actually Valium in new, more modern packaging. Good for spasms, but also anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia and so on.

‘The Gordon gene pool really is a mess,’ he says, smiling again in a way that immediately makes her do the same. Hubert has a dark, subtle sense of humour that appeals to her.

‘I’ve had a look at the book you gave me,’ she says, tapping away at the keys.

‘I’m pleased to hear it. Did you approve of Stanley Kunitz?’

‘Absolutely. I liked the one about the summer.’

‘“End of Summer”? Good choice. But I have a different favourite.’

‘Which one?’

‘You have to guess.’

‘But I haven’t read all the poems yet.’

‘Well, you do that then maybe we can have another coffee.’

‘Is that a challenge?’

‘Perhaps.’ Another smile.

She closes the laptop. ‘I’ve put your prescription through. You can collect it from the nearest chemist.’

‘Thank you, Thea. Goodbye – I hope to see you again soon.’

He gets to his feet, pats Emee for one last time, then tips his cap in farewell before he leaves.

Thea locks the door behind him and takes the file out again. She decides to go back to Leo. The children have blamed him, but in the first two interviews he flatly denies everything and insists that he never left his cabin. The change comes in the third interview.

INTERVIEWER: Have you anything to add since the last time we spoke?

LEO RASMUSSEN: No.

INTERVIEWER: So you still claim that you fell asleep in your cabin, and spent the whole night there?

LEO RASMUSSEN: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: At this point I must inform you that your father has changed his statement.

LEO RASMUSSEN: Lasse is not my father.

INTERVIEWER: OK, your