The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules (11 page)

The day after the great walker robbery, the five of them sat down in the library at the Grand Hotel and read the daily
papers. Now and then the rustle of paper, mutterings and titters could be heard, but it was otherwise quiet. None of them wanted to be disturbed during this delightful reading and they savoured every word. In the end, Martha couldn’t restrain herself.

‘Have you seen this? It says that it was one of the most skilful art robberies ever carried out!’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘Much smarter than when the museum was robbed the last time. Then the robbers had machine guns, set fire to cars and went off with the paintings in a stolen boat. Completely wrong. You shouldn’t attract so much attention.’

‘No, indeed,’ said Rake with a disapproving glance at Martha’s walker. Brains had reattached the orange reflector arm to it.

‘They think it’s a bearded man with long brown hair who carried out the robbery,’ Martha continued.

From Christina came a low, chuckling laugh and Anna-Greta was close to exploding with joy.

‘And he—the bearded man—had a kind look,’ Martha read on.

‘Yes, I said that because it sounded so genuine. A real criminal would never express himself like that,’ said Anna-Greta, releasing such a joyful neigh that Rake was forced to put his hands over his ears. Anna-Greta had never married, and that didn’t surprise him one bit. There may have been suitors in her youth, but she would have laughed them to death—if they hadn’t already been blown away.

‘Well, I never! Have you heard this?’ exclaimed Martha as she looked up from her newspaper. ‘It’s in the
Express
on page seven. The reporter is speculating about the
back soon
sign. He thinks it is about a religious sect which believes in the return of Jesus to earth. His alternative suggestion being that it is from a terrorist league planning new deeds. The police have increased their resources regardless of the speculation.’

‘Increased their resources on account of some oldies on the run,’ Brains said, smiling.

‘And a sign saying
back soon
,’ Christina said, giggling, and pulled out her nail file. Now they were all laughing so much that they could be heard out in reception. Martha noticed this and hushed the others.

‘Mind you, perhaps it was rather unfortunate that the sign was handwritten. That is a clue that might be our downfall,’ she said.

‘But Martha, you surely haven’t forgotten why we are doing this?’ Brains pointed out.

‘No, but prison can wait a while.’

A murmur of agreement was heard from the others. Some other hotel guests walked past on their way to the Veranda restaurant, but the five remained undisturbed in the library. Martha leaned forward.

‘Even if they suspect other villains, we mustn’t relax,’ she said. ‘We never know when they might start to look for us, and what if Nurse Barbara—’

‘The most important thing is that we get our money,’ Anna-Greta cut her off. ‘Why don’t we send our ransom demand to the press today?’

‘Yes, we can send a fax, that’s quick,’ Christina suggested.

‘That’s old fashioned now there are computers,’ Brains objected.

‘But they can trace those,’ said Christina, who had borrowed
one of Martha’s crime novels,
Silent Traces in Cyber Space
, now that she didn’t have access to her beloved classics.

‘Pah, then we’ll do it in the traditional way, like at school,’ said Rake after a moment’s thought. ‘We’ll cut out the words and letters we need from a newspaper. Then we can glue them onto a piece of paper, put the message in an envelope and put that in a mailbox.’

There was silence for a few moments while they all pondered the idea.

‘But the post is so slow nowadays,’ Anna-Greta pointed out, ‘and it doesn’t feel really safe.’

‘Then I’ve got a better idea,’ said Rake. ‘We’ll phone. I am good at disguising my voice.’

‘No, let me phone,’ Anna-Greta chipped in, but then they all protested. Nobody wanted to risk that she would start laughing by mistake. After much discussion they finally agreed to put together a message with letters cut out from the papers. And they would all wear gloves so as not to leave any fingerprints.

‘But one problem still remains,’ said Martha. ‘How are we going to receive the ransom money?’

‘We shall ask them to put the money in a suitcase on one of the big cruise ferries to Finland. Then we will get to go on a round-trip cruise to Helsinki too,’ Brains suggested.

‘What a brilliant idea,’ said Martha, who was keen to go on a cruise with him. Those big ferries were like floating hotels with dance bands and the works, and she might be able to get Brains onto the dance floor.

‘A cruise, yes, why not, it would be fun to go to sea again,’ Rake said. ‘When I sailed to Australia the waves were so high
that you couldn’t even imagine it. In fact, they were—’

‘Wouldn’t it be smarter to ask them to leave the suitcase at Arlanda airport?’ Anna-Greta interrupted him. ‘Then they might think that we are major international-league criminals.’

‘But what if they confuse us with terrorists and start shooting at us?’ said Christina, who was by nature a rather anxious type. The others didn’t think this likely, but to satisfy everybody they settled for the cruise. It did after all feel like the safer option.

‘We’ll post the letter today and give them a week to get hold of the money,’ Martha proposed. ‘But first we must buy newspapers and write the letter indicating the ransom required.’

‘Right you are. How much shall we ask for, do you think?’ asked Brains.

‘Ten million,’ Rake suggested.

‘But’—Anna-Greta looked suddenly concerned—‘that would be an awful lot of banknotes. Let’s see … one thousand thousand-kronor notes makes a million, and ten thousand thousand-kronor notes would be ten million. And all of it in a suitcase? No, I don’t think that would work. An honourable bank transfer would be preferable.’

A somewhat pained silence ensued as nobody had considered that detail.

‘Thousand-kronor notes would attract attention. Perhaps it would be better with five-hundred-kronor notes,’ Brains said.

‘Or why not twenty-kronor notes with the nice portrait of Selma Lagerlöf? They look so distinguished. And then it would be a bit cultural too.’

‘Can’t you count? How many banknotes do you think
that would be? No, let me think. A five-hundred-kronor note weighs about half a gram. All in all it would be about seven kilos of notes,’ said Anna-Greta after some quick mental arithmetic. ‘But the notes will take up a lot of room. Let me see now, if we pack twenty thousand five-hundred-kronor notes they would make a pile four metres high,’ she went on.

‘Then perhaps it would be best with shopping trolleys,’ said Martha. ‘Let me see. Four metres of notes ought to fit into two decent-sized canvas trolleys. Urbanista has one of those shopping bags on wheels. There is one brand which they call Pink Panther. That will hold fifty-five litres.’

‘A pink shopping cart? Let’s keep a bit of order here,’ muttered Rake.

‘They have ones in black or a more masculine brown too, and with an extendable handle,’ Martha continued. ‘And they are rather flat and high so the museum ought to be able to stack the notes in them really neatly.’

‘Keep talking. I’ll go and buy more newspapers in the hotel shop in the meantime,’ said Rake, who had tired of the discussion and wanted to do something constructive.

‘I need some things from the shop too. I’ve been wearing the same outfit for three days,’ Christina mumbled. She put away her nail file and got up too.

‘But Christina, why go to the shop when you could do an Internet order?’ Anna-Greta asked.

‘Because I like my clothes close-fitting.’

‘Mark my words, that is not an advantage at our age,’ said Anna-Greta, but by then Christina had already gone off with Rake.

Half an hour later, they were back in the suite. Now Christina was wearing a red jumper in the same shade as her newly purchased nail polish and a new scarf around her neck. On her wrist she had a shiny new silver bracelet.

‘Ahah, close fitting, I see …’ said Martha.

‘We are staying at the Grand Hotel,’ Christina explained. ‘And it will go on the hotel bill.’

Anna-Greta glared at Christina. Not only was the silly woman spending her money, but she was also fawning over Rake! She herself wouldn’t have anything against a bit of courtly behaviour from him, and she couldn’t understand why he was interested in Christina of all people. Anna-Greta was much more intelligent and well-educated and had lived in a large house on Strandvägen in Djursholm, one of the most desirable suburbs in Stockholm. But evidently it didn’t make any difference. Men’s tastes were very strange. She would have been only too happy to marry a suitable beau, but the problem was that she had never been courted by the right person. Her great love from her student days had come from the working classes, and at the time, her father had intervened and forbidden the romance. She was going to marry someone who was well educated or at least wealthy, he had said. So in the end she didn’t marry at all. For some years she had considered putting an ad in the paper, but although she had come close to doing so several times she hadn’t dared. She sighed and felt sorry for herself, but then found herself thinking about the cruise to Finland. Perhaps she might meet a nice widower on the ship …

‘Don’t just sit there dreaming, Anna-Greta, we must put our ransom letter together,’ said Martha.

The five of them sat around the table. The champagne bottle came out, the nuts and strawberries too, and they started to compose the most hard-hitting message they could think of. Although they only had to put together a few sentences, it took a long time, and it took until the champagne bottle was empty for them to produce a note that they were all satisfied with. While Anna-Greta hummed the tune of a popular hit from the sixties which happened to be about money, they carefully cut out the words and letters and glued them onto a sheet of A4 paper.

Christina nearly signed the note with her own name, but the others stopped her at the last moment. They read through the message, singing a song while they did so. Anna-Greta was pleased that she had got them to write
‘only
10 million’. The museum people would understand that they were being offered a good deal—other villains would certainly ask for more. Martha, however, was not completely satisfied.

‘Doesn’t it sound a bit too kind to be written by real criminals?’ she wondered. ‘Do art thieves give the paintings back personally? Oughtn’t they to be fetched from somewhere? What I mean is, shouldn’t we spice it up a little so that they don’t think we are amateurs?’

‘But if we are nice, they might be more likely to pay,’ said Christina.

They all thought this was probably correct, and in the end they agreed to post the ransom note without making any amendments. Since they didn’t dare use the hotel’s notepaper and envelopes, they simply folded the paper in half and taped it, wrote the address of the National Museum and put a stamp on. Wearing gloves all the time.

‘In fact, we could have just gone across with the letter and then we’d have saved a stamp,’ Anna-Greta pointed out, but she was spontaneously booed by the others.

A little while later, Martha took the note to the mailbox next to the underground station just round the corner. She looked at the flap on the mailbox for a long time before dropping the note in. Then she patted the mailbox a few times and realized just how nervous she actually was. Now it wasn’t a question of an inconsequential minor robbery. They had chosen the path of crime, and now there was no return. They had become
criminals
. On her way back to the hotel she pondered the word. Criminal … it sounded so exciting! She wanted to do a little dance step despite her age, and immediately felt years younger. Her life had acquired a new purpose and she was pleased at the thought of getting so much money in two shopping trolleys. It would have been much more boring if they had been simply sent to a bank account via an abstract financial transaction.
Now they could go on the cruise ship to Finland and enjoy themselves, as well as experience the excitement of trying to get the ransom money home without anyone discovering them. How many people her age got to take part in such adventures?

Chief Inspector Petterson found it incomprehensible. Two valuable paintings had been stolen from the National Museum, and although the police had set up road blocks, checked all the passengers on trains and planes, and contacted various car rental firms, they had no leads. There were no witnesses at the museum either. Of course that couldn’t be right. The thieves couldn’t simply have gone up in smoke. They had obviously escaped in a car before the museum staff realized that the paintings had been stolen. He had heard that museum staff don’t always realize the value of what they have in their collections. Chief Inspector Petterson was a middle-aged man in his prime but with a melancholy frame of mind. The case seemed hopeless. He had no idea at all how the art theft could be solved. He knew everything about weapons, ammunition, car chases and blackmail attempts, but this? The police hadn’t even got in any tips from the underworld. The informants they had contacted had not heard a thing.

‘There must be several years’ planning behind this,’ said his colleague Inspector Rolf Strömbeck, a bearded man of upper middle age, as he sorted the papers on his desk. ‘Imagine getting away without leaving any tracks or other leads. We
don’t have fingerprints and we can’t see anyone suspicious on the pictures from the surveillance cameras either. I just don’t understand this.’

‘The camera that covered the room with the French Impressionists was not on—the thieves had pulled out the plug.’ Petterson sighed. ‘Pah, let’s go and get a cup of coffee.’

The two men got up and then remained standing beside the refreshment table where the coffee machine stood along with a selection of fruit and biscuits. This was Chief Inspector Petterson’s sixth cup of coffee that day. The coffee was hot and smelt of old plastic, but at least it provided him with some much-needed caffeine. There must be other clues; it was just a question of discovering them. That set him to thinking about the museum visitors.

‘It’s time to map out who was at the museum that day and bring them in for questioning. There must surely have been other people there besides those confused old folks that the security guards mentioned.’

‘The old people talked of a man with brown hair that one of the old girls thought was terribly kind. She even wished that he was her own son,’ sighed his colleague.

‘But one of the other old girls accused him of being a thief. He is said to have tried to snatch her handbag. Those poor pensioners must have been shocked by the alarm.’

Petterson went quiet and started ruminating about old age. To think that you could become so confused. Would he himself end up like that? From now on he ought to eat more fruits and vegetables; he had heard that such a diet was good for your brain. He grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl and nodded to his colleague.

‘Shall we take a look at the signs? They are all that the thieves left behind.’

‘As if we’re going to be any the wiser for those …’

They returned to the investigation room and sat down at the desk. There lay the three signs that had been found at the museum:
out of order, inventory being undertaken,
and
back soon.

Chief Inspector Petterson tried to remember what had happened. The signs had delayed the police, and several hours passed before they realized that the elevator actually worked. Then there were the other two signs. The police officer in charge at the scene of the crime had thought that everything was as it should be in the room for nineteenth-century French paintings, and had directed their efforts to searching for stolen paintings in the other exhibit rooms. They had concentrated on the temporary exhibit, ‘Sins and Desires,’ where every painting was scrutinized closely. It was only when one of the curators established that there were no paintings missing from the new exhibit that they enlarged the scene-of-crime investigation to include the other areas. After that, they had started studying the two signs in the Impressionist exhibit with renewed interest.
inventory being undertaken
… Petterson had sent a group of colleagues down to the storerooms to see if the paintings were there, while his technical staff checked through ledgers and computer files. The police devoted a great deal of time and effort to this, but when no Renoirs or Monets were found, they realized that those were indeed the paintings that had been stolen. They weren’t just any old paintings. Claude Monet’s Schelde scene and the work by Renoir had been stolen once before. It was incredible that it could happen again!

‘Smart thieves,’ said Petterson, pointing at the
inventory being undertaken
sign. ‘What a red herring!’

Inspector Rolf Strömbeck looked at the sign for a long time, put a portion of tobacco under his gum and nodded. ‘And we fell for it—so simple yet so damned cunning.’

‘The sign saying
back soon
, what about that? Do you know what that’s about?’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years in the police force,’ his comrade answered. ‘Who can have put up such a sign, and why?’

‘It is at any rate handwritten, while the other signs have been printed on an ordinary printer. That is somebody’s handwriting.’

‘But was the
back soon
sign written by somebody who discovered the theft and then ran off to sound the alarm? In which case, we ought to get in touch with the person concerned as soon as possible.’ He chewed the tip of his pen while he pondered. ‘We ought to ask that person to step forward, but the question is, how do we go about doing that?

Chief Inspector Petterson thought over various alternatives, but couldn’t decide on a good one.

‘If we say we’re looking for a person who has written a sign with the words
back soon
, then we’ll get replies from all over Sweden—and you can guarantee that none of those will be the thieves. No professional criminal leaves such an obvious trail. The printed signs have been handled with gloved hands, but this one has distinct fingerprints in the actual ink. Can you see the thumbs in the corner? The black ink must have been sticky.’ Petterson pushed the sign across to his colleague.

‘You know what? This sign doesn’t lead anywhere. I can
only see one use for it.’ Strömbeck got up, opened the door and hung the
back soon
sign on the handle outside. ‘Now we’ll take a walk and eat lunch in town. Then at least we’ll have a bit of peace for a while.’