Rites of Spring

20

Thea wakes early, as always. It’s just before four; Emee is asleep on the floor next to her bed. The nightlight is on. The moonlight seeps through the blind, drawing a pattern of stripes on the ceiling. Thea gazes up at it, following the lines. She notices a small patch of damp where the wall meets the ceiling. Best not to mention it to David, at least not at the moment. He’s got enough to think about. Things she could never have imagined.

Poor child. You must never tell anyone. Never, never, never . . .

What did Bertil mean by that? What was it that must never be told, and why had he reacted so strongly to Elita’s name?

She takes out her phone, opens a search window and enters ‘Tornaby 1986 murder’. She finds articles from various Skåne newspapers that have been scanned in; they don’t tell her much more than she already knows.

The reporting seems to have died down pretty quickly after the lurid headlines of the first week. Words such as ‘ritual murder’, ‘sacrificial rites’ and ‘child killer’ are replaced by the significantly less charged ‘family tragedy’ and ‘sibling drama’. The size of the typeface clearly shows how interest has waned. Olof Palme had been assassinated only two months earlier, and the twists and turns into the investigation still preoccupied almost every media outlet.

However, one of the tabloids does try to squeeze the last little bit out of the story by running a summary piece with the headline:

The article is illustrated with photographs of both Elita and her stepbrother. Leo seems to be in uniform; his hair is cropped, and his eyes are covered with a black rectangle that is theoretically supposed to protect his identity. The image is grainy, but Thea can make out a straight nose and a square chin.

Elita is smiling confidently in what is presumably a school photo. She looks very different from the girl in the Polaroid. Bolder, angrier in a way that Thea recognises all too well.

Elita is referred to throughout as the sacrificial victim, while Leo is either the stepbrother or the elite soldier. The writer revels in the details surrounding Elita’s death, and much is made of the fact that she left behind a letter in which she said she was planning her own death.

The last article Thea can find is from August 1986, a brief report stating that the court in Helsingborg had convicted Leo of murder and sentenced him to six years in jail, but that the sentence had been reduced because he was only twenty years old and was heavily influenced by his stepsister. Then nothing. The press pack has moved on, and no one cares about a dead gypsy girl anymore.

She switches off her phone, lies back on her pillow and closes her eyes.

Fucking gyppo . . .

She was twelve years old when the word was spat in her face for the first time. A boy yelled it at her in the school playground after he’d asked her to be his girlfriend and she said no.

Admittedly she’d heard whispers about her family before, but there was something about that particular word that made her flinch. It hit her hard, even though she wasn’t really sure what it meant.

Ronny had beaten the shit out of the kid the next day. Her big brother dealt with everyone who used that word. Not that it helped.

Ronny never understood that the more violently he tried to fix things, the worse they would get. The word became branded into his skin until it was impossible to remove, like an invisible tattoo that marked him for life.

It would be many years before she did anything about the situation, but she’d already realised what she had to do.

Before you can become the person you want to be, you have to get rid of the person you are.