The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules

by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

  The Yugoslav mafia was not something he wished to be involved with, and after that conversation he kept his distance during exercise periods. He noticed how the Yugoslav sought out other inmates there in the yard, and how he tried to milk a former bank employee for information. The man was to be tried for economic crimes and had emptied accounts for many years until his wife gave him away.

  A week later the Yugoslav left the remand prison and Brains gave a sigh of relief. Juro had taken too much of an interest in him and Brains had been forced to pretend he was more stupid than he actually was. He who is silent gets information; stupid people who talk give themselves away, he used to say. But one thing he did know—Juro and his mates outside the prison had planned a large robbery.

  ‘Sometimes get caught, not dangerous. Just little rest in prison. Then fetch money,’ the Yugoslav had explained.

  Brains pondered this and wondered if he could adopt that same attitude but develop it a bit more. Skip the crime bit but get rich anyway. That would, after all, be the ultimate solution, but as yet he hadn’t worked out how to achieve it. He needed Martha. Together they would think of something.

  Forty-Four

  ‘And why are you at Hinseberg? People like you should be in an old folks’ home.’

  Martha twirled round. She was in the kitchen and had just poured out a glass of milk when a girl with fuzzy hair, a narrow mouth and a pointed nose came into the room. The girl looked to be in her mid-thirties, was chewing gum with her mouth open and kept her hands demonstratively by her sides. What a welcome, Martha thought. She could at least try to be pleasant.

  ‘Old folks’ home, not likely. I’m not a dinosaur. If I was, I wouldn’t still be standing here, I would have stomped on you already.’

  The girl’s eyelids flickered.

  ‘Oh right, you are one of those cocky types. Watch yourself. Don’t forget that you are a first-timer. I’ve done bird before.’

  Done bird before? Martha thought about that. Presumably it meant that she had been here on earlier occasions.

  ‘You don’t have to “bird” me. There is nothing to stop you from being decent to a new inmate,’ said Martha. She drank a large gulp of milk and put the glass down in the sink. ‘By the way, I’m Martha Andersson.’

  The girl continued to chew her gum.

  ‘I’m Liza. What got you here?’

  ‘Robbery,’ said Martha.

  ‘What, someone like you? Is that why you drink milk—to become stronger for your next burglary? Holy cow!’

  Two younger girls who had come into the kitchen guffawed. Martha looked out of the corner of her eye at the guard behind the glass of one of the long walls and wondered whether she could hear them. Liza’s gaze was hard and vacant. She must be the one who bossed people around here, Martha thought, having already gauged how some things worked at Hinseberg. Some leader types took command, she had heard. Even the guards had said that there were several unspoken rules and it was best to follow them.

  ‘Oh, did you just call me a cow?’ exclaimed Martha.

  Liza nodded.

  ‘If you call me a cow once more, I’ll stuff my walking stick where the sun don’t shine! There’s your warning.’

  The room became silent, and then some repressed giggling could be heard from the girls in the background. Liza took a threatening step forward.

  ‘Listen to me, you senile old bat. Watch your step or you might just find that your face comes into contact with my fist next time you’re in the showers.’

  ‘Showers?’ Martha didn’t understand, and it must have shown.

  ‘That’s where we settle things. Insulated walls and no windows.’

  ‘Oh right, so that’s how it is,’ said Martha, who guessed what the girl was getting at. She changed her tactic and tried a more friendly approach. ‘Do you want some?’ she asked, and held out the milk carton.

  ‘You must be kidding!’

  ‘And why are you locked up here?’

  ‘Murder.’

  Martha almost choked on her milk, coughing several times.

  ‘And who did you rob, then?’ Liza asked.

  ‘Oh, it was an art robbery. It was at the National Museum.’ Martha shrugged her shoulders as if it had been just a trifle.

  ‘Oh, the museum robbery. I’ve read about that. Are the paintings still missing?’

  Martha nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. They disappeared.’

  ‘Like hell they did—where did you hide the paintings? I won’t snitch.’

  ‘Neither we nor the police have found them yet.’

  ‘I won’t fall for that. Out with it now! We all stick together here, get it? If you don’t share, well …’ The girl took Martha’s glass and emptied it down the sink.

  ‘The robbery was successful, but then … it couldn’t all be perfect,’ said Martha, filling her glass again.

  ‘You’re a cocky one, aren’t you? There are lots of people here who have robbed pensioners, you know. Girls whose speciality is robbing folk like you. Take my advice: cool it a bit.’ The girl emptied Martha’s milk down the sink again. ‘Oh, and one more thing. Since you are over-age, we don’t want you in the workshop. You can do general duties. We start working at eight, so you must have breakfast ready by seven o’clock.’

  ‘That’s for the guards—I mean screws—to decide,’ said Martha.

  ‘It’s us and them. Anybody who goes into the screws’ cage and complains doesn’t belong here. Got it? Otherwise you’ll get what’s coming to you in the showers.’

  ‘You are awful,’ Martha muttered.

  ‘Just because you are nearly a corpse doesn’t mean I wouldn’t put my fist into you.’ The girl’s eyes were as icy as the Arctic.

  Martha cleared her throat. ‘Right then, tomorrow morning at seven is breakfast time. See you then.’

  Martha left the kitchen with her head held high and out of the corner of her eye she saw the girl smirking. It immediately became clear to Martha that prison reality was something quite different to what she had seen on TV or read about in crime novels. Here it was a question of balancing on a knife-edge.

  Forty-Five

  ‘This is how it should look. Almost nothing left,’ said Allanson as he surveyed the shed. A large anchor and a crate of beer stood on the floor, and on the shelves were a couple of nets, some lifebuoys and fishing rods—otherwise it was empty. The bicycles had gone, as had the mopeds and the two snow scooters.

  ‘And to think that we got paid in euros just like we wanted. The kids’ bikes and the ten-gear jobs sold like hotcakes. The Estonians were pleased as punch,’ said Janson.

  ‘Yeah, and the mopeds sold well too,’ Allanson added. ‘Now we’ve got some space again. What about a new venture? Bikes and mopeds, for example?’

  ‘I think you might be on to something there. Could we start Saturday?’

  ‘I’m off work on the weekend and I’m going to visit my mum at the retirement home. It’s her birthday. But after that …’

  ‘You’re not going to bloody well visit her at four in the morning, are you?’ Janson smirked.

  ‘No, no.’ Allanson looked down at the floor. He usually got teased because he visited his mother so often. But he was fond of her, and she was so pleased when he came to visit—even though she usually forgot that he had been there the minute he walked out the door.

  ‘I’ll stay with her a while and drive over to meet you after. But I should get her a present. I can’t keep taking her chocolates and flowers.’

  ‘Flowers? She should get them anyway, but take this. It looks completely new and it’s only been getting in the way here.’ He kicked the black shopping trolley that was on the pallet.

  ‘The shopping trolley? But she is too old to go out shopping.’

  ‘Don’t you get it? Let her think she can. Things like that let people who are past it feel a bit younger. And you can always fill it with something nice.’

  Allanson cast a critical eye over the shopping trolley, but then he bright
ened up.

  ‘She’s got one hell of a lot of blankets that she drags around with her. The staff at her retirement home have complained about it. Now she’ll be able to put them in the trolley.’

  ‘Exactly. Just don’t forget to take out the old newspapers first.’

  ‘Sure, but I should take her something to go with it,’ Allanson mused, still not satisfied.

  ‘You said that they had stopped serving cakes and biscuits at the retirement home. So buy some fancy buns and cream cakes for the place. And then you can get something tasty for us too while you’re about it.’

  Allanson’s face lit up. ‘You always have such good ideas.’

  Janson laughed, closed the doors and locked up the shed. They got into the car again and did the usual round past the skip and Lost Property.

  Forty-Six

  When the alarm clock went off at half past six, Martha gave a start. Many elderly people were in the habit of waking up early in the morning, but not her. In her world, it was an unchristian time of day for birds, villains and uncouth youths who hadn’t yet gone to bed. She unwillingly forced herself up, had a shower and got dressed. When the guards let her out at seven, she shuffled along to the kitchen at the end of the corridor. There were no kitchen islands and no fancy equipment either. Perhaps that was just as well; otherwise she would only have got confused. She got out the milk and the ham and cheese slices from the fridge, and found the oats and muesli in the cupboard. Cups and plates were on the shelves above the sink, and cutlery lay in the drawers underneath. Yawning, she boiled eggs, made some porridge—the old-fashioned way, in a saucepan—laid the table and put out bread, butter and marmalade. When she had finished, she flopped down on a chair with a cup of coffee in her hand. But she hadn’t laid a place for Liza, the chewing-gum girl. Her place at the short end of the table was empty.

  The girls came in one after the other and Martha introduced herself. They said hello, sat down and began to help themselves. They were all eating their breakfast in peace and quiet, but when Liza came crashing in, everyone looked up. You could tell at a distance that the girl was in a bad mood and it didn’t improve when she discovered that nobody had laid her place at the table.

  ‘Where is my cup?’

  ‘I suppose it is in the cupboard,’ Martha answered.

  ‘Then put it on the table,’ Liza responded.

  ‘The plates are on the top shelf and on the lowest shelf you’ll find the cups. The glasses are by the sink.’

  The girls stopped eating and the whole room fell silent. Martha ate her porridge and slowly stirred her coffee. Nobody could fail to notice the tension in the room, but Martha was too old to care.

  ‘Fetch the cup and lay my place too!’ Liza growled.

  ‘I might lay your place tomorrow, but that depends. I am extremely fussy about how people treat me.’

  Liza gave Martha’s cup a shove and coffee splashed out onto the table. Martha, who had expected something of the sort, calmly filled the cup again and continued to eat her porridge. Then she turned to the girl next to her.

  ‘Is she always this difficult in the morning?’

  No answer. Somebody coughed, a spoon clinked against a plate and the girls exchanged silent looks. The next moment, Martha felt somebody pull her chair back, grab hold of her blouse and yank her up.

  ‘My coffee!’ Liza roared.

  ‘There is tea too,’ said Martha, calmly taking the hands away from her collar. The girls all gasped, and then came a half-repressed giggle which spread. Soon they were all laughing. Liza glared at Martha, but knew that she couldn’t intervene. The girl had dominated the others by threatening to sort them out in the showers, but with Martha it was different. If she took an almost eighty-year-old woman there and beat her up, she would be the loser. She realized that, as did all the others in the room.

  ‘Take your breakfast, Liza, and I’ll do the washing-up later,’ said Martha.

  Liza pretended not to hear, but she fetched a cup, poured out her coffee and sat at the short end of the table. Without a word, she buttered some bread, and when she had drunk her coffee she got up and left the room. Martha watched, and wondered how and when Liza would take her revenge.

  Forty-Seven

  Petra had been slumbering on the underground when she’d caught sight of the headlines about the great art theft at the National Museum. Not so many years had passed since the last robbery, and she’d wondered if the same thieves had struck again. She’d eagerly bought a paper but had been disappointed by the lack of detail given in the article. The police were keeping quiet, and at first they hadn’t even announced which paintings had been stolen.

  At the time, Petra hadn’t followed the case particularly because she and her boyfriend had had a big fight and at the same time she’d been studying intensively for exams. Even her cleaning job at the Grand Hotel had been put on the backburner because she was so busy. It wasn’t until after her exams that she finally sorted things out with her boyfriend. They had had a good talk and had decided that, after the stress of her exams, they both needed a well-deserved holiday. So they had gone off on a last-minute charter holiday to Spain. After Petra had arrived back from her holiday, well rested and with an attractive suntan, she went back to her part-time work at the Grand Hotel.

  That was when she had found out that the two stolen paintings were a Monet and a Renoir. She was in the library at the Grand Hotel leafing through some old evening papers when she saw them. The pictures. She gasped. The man in the Renoir that she had seen had worn a hat and a moustache and there were extra sailing boats on the Schelde river scene in the Monet, but apart from that the paintings were very similar to the pair that she had taken down in the Princess Lilian suite. She had simply assumed that they were poor reproductions—but what if they weren’t? Yet surely it would be utterly remarkable if the crooks had left the paintings behind in a hotel room just one hundred metres from the National Museum. The works of art would almost certainly have been spirited out of the country ages ago. Nevertheless, she felt a growing concern, because when she thought about it in more detail she remembered that the paintings did have noticeably fancy frames. At the same time, that was what people did, wasn’t it? Adding a beautiful frame could make the worst reproduction look almost professional.

  Petra bit her nails and couldn’t concentrate. The paintings had disappeared from the cleaning trolley, but perhaps they were still in the annex. She would have liked to ask if anyone had seen them, but she hesitated to do so. If they had been the real paintings then she could end up in trouble because she had switched them without orders from above. Paintings worth thirty million … She looked around her. There was a murmur of people at the bar, and over in the Veranda restaurant guests were eating. If she went across to the National Museum and asked to see reproductions of Renoir and Monet, she could compare them with what she remembered of the paintings in the suite. Then she smiled at her own stupidity. All she had to do was to go to the museum’s home page on the Internet. She got up and went to the computer room on the ground floor.

  She quickly went to the National Museum site and clicked her way into the collections. It didn’t take long to find the two paintings. The hotel’s colour printer was right next to her and she clicked on ‘print’. Then she put the copies in her handbag and went back to the computer to delete her surfing history. With the papers in her bag, she hurried down to the annex. She simply must look for the paintings once more. They must be somewhere in the hotel because she couldn’t imagine that they had just disappeared. Unless somebody had discovered them and realized that they were not worthless reproductions but paintings worth thirty million kronor …

  Forty-Eight

  When Allanson walked into Diamond House with the shopping trolley, his mother, Dolores, was in her room sleeping. He waited a while out in the lounge but got tired of that and went in to wake her. His mother’s thin white hair lay unbrushed on the pillow and she seemed confused, but when she saw who had entered the roo
m her face lit up.

  ‘Ah, my little boy, how nice to see you!’

  ‘Happy birthday! Congratulations on being one year older!’ Allanson gave her a hug.

  ‘Nonsense. To congratulate somebody for getting older, my word, it should be the opposite. Every time I have a birthday you should put the flag at half mast and say you are sorry.’

  Allanson held out the bag with the cakes in it. ‘We’ve got something here to go with the coffee, and I brought along a surprise for you too. What do you think of this shopping trolley?’

  ‘To put the cakes in?’

  ‘No, your knitting wool and your blankets; you can keep all that in it.’

  ‘Yes, it’ll do nicely for that. Put it in the corner over there and we’ll go and have some coffee.’

  ‘I’ll just take out the newspaper first.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll ask Nurse Barbara to do it later. I’ve got some coffee cups here, but can you please go and fetch the coffee?’

  Allanson did as his mother asked. He always did so, and it was probably for the best. His mother sat on the sofa and indicated that he should sit in the armchair.

  ‘Do you remember when you were a young lad and had picked lingonberries?’

  Allanson nodded. Today his mother seemed to want to talk about the time they had been in the forest and seen bear tracks. It was a long and complicated story and his mother would take a long time telling it. He put the cakes on a plate. Eating sweet cakes made his mother tired, and after a while she would fall asleep. However much he liked her, it was trying to hear the same story over and over again. He leaned back in the armchair. After an hour or so she would be sleeping happily and then he could go off and join Janson.

  The construction workers had gone home and the annex was empty. Petra went up to the noticeboard to see who had used the cleaning trolley after her the day she had taken down the paintings. But a new cleaning list had already been put up. She started to walk around in the annex in the vague hope of finding the two missing paintings. She searched everywhere but it was no good. She started to despair and accused herself of being careless for leaving the paintings on the cleaning trolley. From now on she would look at every painting with respect—with the utmost attention. She continued to search in the cellar and the storerooms, and then returned, exhausted, to the annex. Her hands shook as she got out her lighter. What had she done?