The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules

by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

  And with that they started to hunt around the Princess Lilian suite, wrapped in their wet towels, for two stolen paintings worth about thirty million kronor. But try as they might, they couldn’t find either of them.

  Twenty-Three

  Inspector Arne Lönnberg had received a telephone call from an overwrought young woman at the Diamond House retirement home. Five people had disappeared, even though the home was closely guarded. He looked through his papers. Could it really be true? Five people didn’t usually disappear at the same time, especially since the people concerned were not exactly young—they were seventy-five years old or more. The woman who phoned him had sounded rather anxious and had asked him to be discreet. If it became known that people had disappeared, the retirement home risked losing their clients, she had said. Clients? He snorted. Being a client was surely something you chose yourself. Nowadays it was mainly children and grandchildren who put you away in a home. You could hardly be considered a client then, could you? He was lucky he was single and would not have to put up with well-meaning children who involved themselves in his living arrangements when he got old.

  He thumbed the piece of paper on his desk and wondered what he should do. Old people could walk out from retirement homes as the mood took them, at least in theory, and the police had neither the will, the resources, nor the authority to go out looking for them. One could, of course, put them on the observation list in various registers, that was true, and then they would be located if they tried to leave the country. But otherwise, no. As long as no next of kin had reported them missing and they hadn’t committed a crime, it was not the business of the police. Inspector Lönnberg leaned back in his chair. He did not begrudge the old people a good time. He hoped that they had gone on a ferry cruise in secret or were keeping out of the way of some greedy relatives. There were, in fact, some cases where old people didn’t get a moment’s peace because their children were so intent on getting their inheritance.

  He took the piece of paper with his notes and wrote down the name and telephone number of the girl who had phoned, in case she got in touch again. But then he changed his mind, screwed up the paper and threw it into the waste-paper basket. If they phoned from the retirement home again, he could note the oldies’ names in the register. But they should at least be able to enjoy a few days at liberty before being forced back into the fold.

  The men became impatient after having to walk around the suite with their wet towels looking for the paintings. The Princess Lilian suite was as large as a big city flat with its five rooms, and it was full of potential hiding places. So they quite simply failed to find the paintings. In the end, they returned to their room, had a shower and got dressed. They had hardly finished when they heard Christina’s joyful voice.

  ‘You are not allowed to give up, try again!’ Her eyes glowed, and she quoted yet another of the classic Swedish poets, but she playfully added in a few words about towels—which indicated that she was in a particularly good mood. She was otherwise always very careful to treat the classics with due respect.

  Since nobody had found the paintings, she organized a game and the person who found them was promised a large bowl of chocolate creams. Anna-Greta pursed her lips, Brains raised his eyebrows and Rake smiled to himself. Martha, for her part, was pleased that her friend had brightened up and was so full of ideas. She thought it was because they had left Diamond House and that she enjoyed Rake’s company. Perhaps Christina had even fallen in love?

  ‘It was such a lot of trouble to steal the paintings that I really hope you haven’t hidden them so well that we can’t find them again,’ said Rake.

  ‘Oh no, but as you have travelled so much in the world you ought to have enough imagination to find them,’ Christina teased.

  Rake straightened his back and looked around him with the air of somebody who knew what he was about. He so very much wanted to please Christina, so it must be he who found the paintings. Granted, he was not a connoisseur of fine art, but during his years as a seaman he had now and then visited various museums when in port. He started looking at the paintings on the walls in the various rooms, went up to them, lifted them up in the air and checked if there was anything written on the back. Then he came to an abrupt halt. Above the grand piano hung some paintings that he recognized. One showed a man and a woman sitting and talking at a café; the other was a river scene with old sailing boats. But in the painting that he likened to the Renoir the man had acquired a strange hat, long hair and spectacles. And in Monet’s painting from Scheldt there was a modern little yacht that hadn’t been there before. Now he understood. Christina had hidden the paintings in her own very special way. A wave of tenderness flooded over him. The clever woman had quite simply altered them with the help of some watercolour paint—not very much, but just enough to confuse the observer. The signatures had been altered too. He examined the bottom-right corner. Instead of Renoir’s signature he could now read Rene Ihre and Monet had been given the name Mona Ed.

  Twenty-Four

  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?’

&
nbsp; ‘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.

  Renoir’s Conversation and Monet’s From the Mouth of the Schelde are in our custody. The paintings will be returned in exchange for a ransom of only 10 million kronor. The money should be put into two black Urbanista shopping trolleys and placed on the Silja Serenade cruise ship bound for Finland and leaving Stockholm on 27 March, before 16.00 hours. Further instructions will be sent later. As soon as we have received the money, the paintings will be returned to the museum.

  P.S. If you contact the police, we shall destroy the paintings.

  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 won
dered. ‘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?

  Twenty-Five

  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.