The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules (30 page)

‘Well, that’s one for the book. Those damn pensioners got into the van with their walkers but are now leaving it without them. They haven’t even got walking sticks. Didn’t I tell you they were shady types?’ Inspector Lönnberg said, pointing at the oldies in the half-dark.

‘Now don’t get excited, Lönnberg. You never know with these pensioners,’ said Strömbeck. ‘Park on that track to the left and slam the car door when you shut it. It will seem normal. Then walk up the slope while I sneak after them.’

‘Okay, but be careful. It’s dark.’

‘All the better, then they won’t see me.’

‘But don’t forget the pitfalls. This time of year you could sprain your ankle on winter apples.’

‘I won’t see what I slip on until afterwards, will I?’ Strömbeck muttered. He wound his scarf an extra time round his neck, put up his collar and, bent low, sneaked towards the house. At first he didn’t see anything, but when his eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, he could make out three black silhouettes. If anyone here was risking a bad fall, then it was these three, he thought. Perhaps they’d end up with a fractured hip, every one of them. He went closer. The oldies were not sneaking around. They were walking as if they were going to visit somebody—although it was perfectly obvious that nobody was at home in the house which had no lights on at all. Strömbeck got into a good position behind a fir tree and peeped between the branches. The three walked slowly round the house and now and then looked up at the windows before approaching the entrance and ringing the bell. When nobody answered, they made their way to the cellar entrance.

One of the men fumbled with the lock, but Strömbeck didn’t see what happened next. He plucked up courage and nipped in through the gate. Once inside the grounds, he caught sight of a greenhouse. That ought to be the perfect vantage point.

Martha stared up at the enormous luxury villa which towered above her like a fairy-tale castle. What if the villains were sitting inside with the lights turned off and waiting to ambush them? Wasn’t there something fishy about that dark blue
Volvo? Perhaps it was owned by the people living here—but in that case wouldn’t they have driven into the yard? What if it was the police? Or the Yugoslav mafia? Were they going straight into a trap where they would be caught red-handed? Martha shivered in the dark. This was all beginning to be a bit too much to keep track of.

‘Psst!’ Brains put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ve forced the lock, now I’ve only got to deactivate the alarm. Can you fetch Anders with the trolley?’

‘What about the walkers?’

‘Bring them too.’

Martha buttoned up her coat. Dear, oh dear, what a feeling in her tummy. Now they were in it for real. They could still say that they had gone to the wrong house, but as soon as they took the mailbags they would be in trouble. If anyone saw them, then that was it! They still had a few minutes to abort the whole project—but, no, they had, after all, dreamed of the
ultimate crime
for so long. She took a very deep breath and hurried off to the van. There, she took out her walker and signalled to the others to join her. Anders was first out, and when he reached the cellar door he opened up his luggage trolley.

‘Where are the bags?’

‘They are down there,’ Brains whispered and pointed down the cellar steps. ‘They look like ordinary ten-kilo bags. Carry them up one at a time. Then we can each take a bag on the walker.’

‘What if they collapse like the stroller did?’ said Martha.

‘Pah, you didn’t buy them on the Internet.’

Anders hurried down the steps.

‘I hope he is as competent as Christina claims,’ Martha whispered.

‘Oh yes, he is strong,’ Brains noted.

‘That isn’t the same thing,’ said Martha.

After a few moments, Anders’s grunts could be heard from down in the cellar, and he managed to lift four bags before he came back up the steps, panting.

‘I’ll take three on the trolley and you can help with the fourth one,’ he said, putting a bag on Martha’s walker. Just after he had done that, Martha thought she saw somebody in the greenhouse.

‘There’s somebody there!’

Anders stopped in his tracks.

‘We’ll withdraw slowly to the van as if we hadn’t seen anything,’ he said.

At that point, the shadow in the greenhouse moved and then rushed out. The apparition ran in their direction with its arm stretched out as if holding a gun. Anders speeded up, and Martha and Brains found cover behind a tree. The man got closer, but when he cut across the lawn he fell.

‘He must have tripped over the compost,’ said Brains.

‘Or an apple,’ Martha said.

The League of Pensioners quickly withdrew to the van, while Anders ran ahead with the trolley. But it was dark and there were a lot of apples, and when the trolley hit something, the mailbags fell off.

There go our millions
, Martha thought while she tried to get her bag to the van, gasping as she did so. The ten kilos bumped up and down in her walker basket in a worrying manner, and she was afraid she would lose the lot. If the bag fell onto the
ground, she wouldn’t have the strength to pick it up again. Then Brains came to her aid, and at last they reached the van. The Green Menace stood there with the rear doors open and the wheelchair ramp lowered, so you only had to drive straight in. But Anders was taking his time, and Martha thought that he had laid his hands on the money and taken off. Or he had ended up in a scuffle with the man who had tripped. Indeed, a lot of thoughts flashed through her mind before Anders finally came running up. She froze where she was.

‘Where are the bags?’ she asked, staring at the empty trolley.

‘I’ll explain. We must rush. Get in!’

He shooed them into the van, retracted the ramp, closed the rear doors and nipped into the driver’s seat.

‘Where are the bags?’ Martha asked again, but she didn’t receive an answer. Anders turned the ignition key and accelerated as he turned into the road and drove off. Not until they had got some distance did he turn around.

‘How many bags did you get?’

‘One, that’s all,’ said Brains. ‘Where are yours?’

‘To think that you’ve bought a big van to transport one sack of potatoes,’ he said. ‘Expensive transport.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That wasn’t a wine cellar, but a
potato cellar
,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a cold, but you ought to have noticed. The smell, I mean. They were
sacks of potatoes.’

‘Must have got the wrong address,’ Brains tried to explain it.

‘The man on the lawn, then, who was that?’ Martha wondered.

Anders started laughing so heartily that he could barely
hold the steering wheel. Nobody heard what he said. Not until his third attempt did he succeed.

‘The man said he was from the police. The Great Potato Robbery …’

Now they all roared with laughter and started speaking at the same time so that Martha had to call them to order.

‘Perhaps the sacks of potatoes were just a red herring?’

‘You and your red herrings,’ Rake muttered.

‘No, the raid that Juro planned might have gone wrong,’ said Christina in such an authoritative tone that everybody listened. ‘You know those colour ampoules that the banks have nowadays? The Yugoslavs might have robbed the security van but then got red dye all over the banknotes.’

‘Blue dye,’ Anna-Greta corrected her.

‘Then they would have had to throw everything away. That’s why there were no mailbags in the cellar. That could be the explanation.’

‘And the potatoes?’ Brains wondered.

‘Just a few sacks put by for winter.’

‘But Juro won’t give up so easily,’ Brains said.

‘Perhaps not, but there aren’t so many security vans nowadays,’ Christina went on. ‘I ought to have thought of it before. That type of robbery is old hat. Now there are smarter ways. Incidentally, there is a car behind us. A Mercedes.’

‘Christina might be right,’ Brains chipped in. ‘They talked a lot about security vans in the nick, but the people who were convicted had been in prison many years. They could have missed the latest.’

‘I think that Mercedes is actually following us,’ Martha interrupted them.

They were silent for a few moments and then they all
turned round. It was hard to see in the dark, but you couldn’t mistake the headlights, and when they passed a street lamp they saw that the car was grey.

‘Well, we are in Djursholm, after all. Mercedes cars are just as common here as bicycles in Copenhagen. Perhaps it would be stranger if we
hadn’t
seen a Mercedes,’ Anna-Greta pointed out.

They were satisfied with that answer, and on the way to the city the subject changed to their journey. Now they wouldn’t have any money for it.

‘Pity, I was looking forward to travelling abroad,’ said Christina; then she sneezed. She always seemed to be catching colds, but the black clothes had been rather thin.

‘Regrettably, we will have to cancel our tickets and hotel reservations,’ said Anna-Greta. ‘But that’s no problem with the help of the Internet.’

‘A good thing, Anna-Greta, that you can take it like that. We shouldn’t regard this as a failure, but rather as a full-scale rehearsal,’ said Martha. ‘We have experienced lots of new things.’

They all agreed with her, and when they reached the retirement home they were very tired but no longer so disappointed. Martha got out of the van, and when she heard the faint sound of an engine she turned round. For a moment she thought she glimpsed the grey Mercedes, but when she looked again she couldn’t see it. She must have imagined it.

The next morning they were sitting with their minds elsewhere and drinking coffee when Brains suddenly rustled the newspaper a bit more than usual.

‘Now here’s something, have you seen this?’ he said, opening the pages of the paper flat so that all could see: “Big seizure after failed robbery. Banknotes unusable.”

‘What did I tell you!’ Christina exclaimed and clapped her hands in delight.

‘Probably best we go into my room,’ Martha signalled and got up. The others followed after her. Once installed on her sofa, Brains read aloud from the newspaper. The article was about a security van that had been robbed and the discovery of a pile of mailbags at a recycling centre. The notes had been dyed blue and were impossible to use. They all looked at Christina.

‘Well, it seems you were right,’ said Brains. ‘And it could have been Juro. Weird that he should make a mistake about something so simple.’

‘Even villains can miss out on modern developments,’ said Martha.

‘The guards in the vans have a GPS, too,’ Christina went on. ‘You can’t take those cases outside the area they are pre-programmed for. If you do, the GPS notes it and sends an alarm.’

They all turned round and gaped at Christina. After her stint in prison she had become really interested in crime. She was the sort of person who really immersed herself in a subject. If she became interested in gardening, she would only talk about plants, and if her interest switched to art, then it was only paintings that mattered. Now she seemed to have settled on crime. Complicated crime.

‘GPS and ampoules with dye. Then you’ve got to fool the system. Perhaps you can do it with cold. If you freeze the whole thing,’ Brains thought aloud.

‘It’s only in Southern Europe they still use the old security cases,’ Christina said. ‘We could go down there.’

‘The prisons abroad aren’t as nice as the Swedish ones. No, I’ve got another idea. Instead of stealing money that has already been stolen, we commit the robbery ourselves,’ said Martha.

A deathly silence followed, and nobody dared to look anybody else in the eye. Martha had put into words what all of them—in secret—had been thinking: should they go the whole way and become
real
robbers?

‘You mean …?’ Christina rocked on her chair.

‘Big-time robbery is actually serious,’ said Anna-Greta. ‘We’d go from being nice painting kidnappers and people who intended taking money that had already been stolen, to big-time robbers ourselves. Is this really in line with the philosophy of the League of Pensioners?’

‘How else are we going to fill the Robbery Fund? As long as we don’t hurt anybody and we give the money to a good cause, I can’t see that there is such an enormous difference.’

‘“It is more beautiful to hear a string that snaps than never to draw a bow,”’ declared Christina, who, despite having switched to detective stories, still remembered her Swedish classics.

‘But how can we carry out a big-time robbery?’ Rake wondered. ‘Five oldies can hardly storm into a bank with drawn pistols. This sounds difficult, that’s for sure.’

‘All professions have become more complicated. And more boring too,’ Anna-Greta added. ‘When I worked in a bank there were no computers. I used to count banknotes as quick as a magician, and nobody could do sums in their head
as fast as me. Now those skills just don’t count for anything. Everything is on computers. You just press your mouse.’

‘Well, whatever,’ Martha went on. ‘We can’t really think other people are going to commit our crimes for us. We must think up something ourselves.’

‘So what are we going to do?’ Brains asked.

‘I don’t know. But when you least expect it, help is at its closest,’ said Martha.

And believe it or not, so it was.

The five of them were interrupted just as they were discussing the exact time for the big robbery. Without warning, Nurse Barbara stepped into Martha’s room and said that everybody should immediately go to the lounge. When they asked why, she was already halfway out the door.

‘The damn woman.’ Rake made a face. ‘She could at least have said what it was about.’

They had barely arrived in the lounge and noticed the flowers on the table before Barbara clapped her hands, climbed up onto a chair and said:

‘Now we are going to celebrate, my friends.’ She was a bit unsteady on her heels.

‘My friends? That’s going a bit far,’ Rake muttered.

‘Thanks to a donation from Dolores, we are going to have a big party here tomorrow. This is the fifth anniversary of
Diamond House, and right in time for the jubilee we have some other news too.’ Nurse Barbara’s face broke into a wide smile. ‘After long negotiations, Director Mattson has bought two retirement homes which will be part of a new organization. Yes, Director Mattson will describe this to you at a meeting later today, but I can already tell you that the new retirement homes will be amalgamated with Diamond House. Everything will be organized in a new company and Director Mattson and I will be on the board. This is indeed something to celebrate …’

‘For you perhaps,’ said Martha.

‘Nurse Barbara has said that we are going to have a big party,’ Dolores chipped in, and everybody turned towards her. She bent down over her shopping trolley and dug around among the blankets while she hummed to herself. Then she pulled out some five-hundred-kronor notes and held them up for all to see. ‘This is for the party, and there is more here if it should be needed.’

‘Oh no,’ groaned Christina and Anna-Greta simultaneously Brains went pale, Rake hiccupped and Martha felt her tummy cramp. If the police found out that five-hundred-kronor banknotes were circulating at the retirement home, they would search the place again. It wouldn’t take them many minutes to discover that the numbers were the same as those of the notes on the ferry that had ‘blown away’, and before long the hiding place under Martha’s bed would be revealed.

‘Oh dearie me, things are getting hot,’ said Martha.

‘They are indeed. We must act NOW,’ Brains whispered.

‘I’ll immediately book tickets and the hotel,’ said Anna-Greta.

Martha got up, and while the murmur got louder inside the lounge she went up to the window to think. They must be off as soon as possible, but they hadn’t finished their preparations for the next coup. A robbery must be planned down to the tiniest detail. She looked out. A car slowed down and stopped a little further down the hill. A dark blue Volvo. She looked up and down the street, but the grey Mercedes she had seen earlier had disappeared.

The party at the retirement home started at four in the afternoon. Nurse Barbara had thought that was the best since, as usual, she considered that everybody should be in bed by eight.

‘She can never relax, can she?’ said Martha. ‘Children are allowed to stay up longer when there’s a party.’

‘Some people have to have strict rules to feel good,’ said Brains.

‘But at her own party …’ Martha sighed.

When they were dressed for the party and Brains had come to fetch her, Martha glanced out of the window again. There was the grey Mercedes.

‘Brains, did you see?’

‘Wait, I forgot my glasses,’ he said, but when he returned the car had driven off. Instead, the dark blue Volvo from the day before had parked down the hill.

‘First there was a grey Mercedes here, and now there’s a dark blue Volvo. Why?’ Martha wondered.

‘Everybody has a Volvo like that.’

‘But that Volvo has a trailer hitch and double rear mirrors.’

‘The police would hardly keep watch on a retirement home, would they? It must be somebody else,’ said Brains. ‘What if—’

The door opened, and in came Rake.

‘What are you doing? Everyone’s waiting.’

‘We’re coming,’ said Brains, but as soon as Rake had left the room he turned to Martha again. ‘You know what, I’m beginning to feel afraid. If that was Juro who failed with the van robbery, then he must quickly get hold of money some other way. I think he wants to pump me for everything I know about locks and alarms. They are tough guys, that lot. What if he has worked out that I’m living here and he is the person sitting in the grey car?’

Martha slipped her hand into his.

‘But the Mercedes isn’t there any longer. You can relax. Now we must hurry because Anna-Greta has promised that we shall sing.’

She led him out into the lounge, where they joined the others in the choir against the short wall. Martha pulled out her tuning fork, sounded a tone and then they all started singing old Swedish favourites before letting Rake finish off with ‘Towards the Sea’. When Anna-Greta indicated that she would like to sing ‘Childhood Faith’ a capella, the others said it was time to get seated.

Then a fanfare was heard and the lights were dimmed.

‘Take a seat, everybody,’ Nurse Barbara urged, and soon after that two waiters came in with a shellfish and salmon paté on a bed of dry ice. It lay in a large porcelain platter which was
decorated with lettuce leaves and dill. When the ceiling lights suddenly changed to blue, it all looked very magical.

‘Goodness, that is quite something,’ said Martha. ‘Dolores seems to have been very generous.’

‘With our money,’ Martha added.

‘See that carbon dioxide snow? Not something you want to dip your fingers into. That is really cold and can freeze most things,’ said Brains.

After a while the lights were turned on again and Barbara, wearing an evening gown with a plunging neckline, started to hand out streamers and party hats.
Evidently she isn’t so stingy after all
, Martha thought.
Perhaps she has learned her lesson
. Then champagne was served, and when everyone had been given a glass, Director Mattson got up and proposed a toast.

‘To the future!’ he said, looking down into Barbara’s cleavage.

The main course consisted of roast turkey with fancy potatoes and haricots verts, and everybody rubbed their eyes, wondering if this was really happening.

‘This is almost like a Nobel Prize banquet,’ said Christina.

‘All that is lacking is the prize money,’ Anna-Greta said with a neigh.

The murmuring got louder and the elderly residents were enjoying themselves, though many of them wondered whether they were dreaming. But when Dolores got up and with clasped hands thanked her son for the money, everybody knew they were at the retirement home as usual. After her little speech, the lights were dimmed once more, a wall of smoke spread out and the two waiters appeared again. Accompanied by music and pulsating disco lights, they served raspberry sorbet
and chocolate sauce in small dishes decorated with lemon balm. Except for the fact that the disco lights triggered two epileptic fits, everything went off well. When it was getting near eight o’clock, Nurse Barbara clapped her hands.

‘My dear friends, it is getting late. It will soon be time to withdraw.’

‘We’re not going to do that at all,’ the oldies called out in one voice, but before she could say anything more Director Mattson got up.

‘This is a very special evening,’ he started off. ‘First and foremost, we would like to thank Dolores for treating us to this party, but I also have an announcement.’

‘Probably more staff cuts,’ Martha mumbled.

‘Nurse Barbara told you earlier today that we have amalgamated with two other retirement homes, but that is not the only thing we are celebrating. Nurse Barbara and I have got engaged.’

‘Oh, it’s like that, now I see. This way you don’t have to pay for your own party, you misers,’ Martha muttered to herself.

The door opened and in came the two waiters with a strange machine which blew out bubbles. While the transparent, glittering bubbles floated around in the disco light, Martha and Brains sneaked a look at Dolores’s shopping trolley. This party must have cost a packet, and it was only a matter of time before Dolores reached deeper into the trolley and discovered that the rest was just newspaper. Martha leaned close to Brains.

‘We ought to act tomorrow, or at the very latest at the end of the week.’

‘I know. It might be possible, even though we haven’t had
time to prepare properly. We have Anders, after all …’

They retired to her room and while the night settled they sat with pen and paper and drew up plans.

‘I don’t think anybody has ever seen a robbery like this before,’ Brains finally said with a voice that vibrated with pride.

‘Nor me,’ Martha said and smiled.