The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules

by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

  Then Anders had hugged Christina and said that he was proud of her, after which he had pointed out how boring and meaningless his civil service job was. By helping the elderly he felt he could do some good. Indeed, that is how Anders happened to become a handyman for the League of Pensioners. Martha accepted this and thought it was wise to maintain contact with the younger generation so as not to let the group stagnate. However, he could never become a proper member; he was going to be paid for his work. They had also decided that they would administer the Robbery Fund themselves.

  ‘I’ll be in charge of that bank account,’ said Anna-Greta with her glass-breaking voice, and then there wasn’t so much to add.

  Anders hadn’t been able to refrain from spilling the beans to his sister. Emma, in turn, had rolled her eyes and said that their mother seemed to be getting younger and more daring every day. Martha had heard every word when the brother and sister stood smoking on the street outside Diamond House.

  ‘From now on, I will take better care of Mother,’ said Anders.

  ‘Me too,’ Emma agreed.

  When Martha heard this, she agreed to let Anders join in. And then, at the evening meeting that same day, they realized he was needed.

  ‘Large detached houses in Djursholm are awkward. The wine cellar is nearly always in the basement down some steps. So it would be great if we could get some help,’ said Brains.

  ‘And it’ll be good to have a contact in Sweden who can look after our things while we live abroad,’ Christina said. ‘I’m sure there will be lots that must be arranged here.’

  Martha agreed with that, because as soon as the five had got their money they were going to fly to the West Indies. They had made that decision a few days earlier. Anna-Greta had already booked the flights and a hotel on the Internet, as well as arranging all the necessary papers. How she had managed that was more than Martha could fathom, because they ought to be in the criminal register. Then she realized that the system would certainly have weeded them out because of their age. So there were some benefits to being old.

  A car in front sounded its horn and Martha wanted to do the same, but then she remembered she was in the passenger seat and wasn’t driving. It was Anders who was steering the rocking van towards the centre of Djursholm and not her. After he had changed to a lower gear and driven past the library, he continued straight ahead and then turned to the left beside the lake path. Martha looked out. They drove past several large, luxury detached houses, each one seemingly larger and more magnificent than the one before. Then they drove past a bay and up a slope.

  ‘Here it is,’ said Anders. He turned right and parked the van at the side of the road. It had become silent in the van, and they were all filled with the solemnity of the moment. Rather cautiously, they studied the house.

  ‘Skandiavägen, that’s the right address. I can’t see any lights in the window,’ said Brains. ‘The mother-in-law must have gone away, like Juro said.’

  ‘It looks completely empty,’ Christina whispered with a shaky voice. ‘But do you really think they have hidden the mailbags here?’

  ‘We’ll observe first before we strike,’ Martha said.

  ‘If anybody questions us, we’ll simply say that we thought this was the Crown Retirement Home. Isn’t that what you said, Martha?’ Rake asked.

  ‘Yes, right. The house is as big as an institution. The Crown sounds perfect. Did you bring your picklock with you, Brains?’

  ‘Yes, and some extra cellar keys. People often have the fanciest locks you can imagine but forget the cellar.’

  ‘And the alarm?’ Christina wondered.

  ‘You know that. It’s my speciality,’ Brains answered.

  ‘Right then, let’s go in,’ said Christina, putting on a black scarf. If you wore black you couldn’t be seen so easily—that was the first thing she had learned at Hinseberg. Now she looked as if she was going to a royal funeral. The only thing missing was the mourning crêpe.

  ‘OK, then?’ said Brains, who thought it was unnecessary to remain sitting in the van too long. ‘Everyone ready?’

  The very same moment that Martha opened the door, a car drove up the slope. The dark blue Volvo seemed to glide forward and slow down just after it had passed the van.

  ‘That’s done it,’ Martha said.

  Seventy-One

  ‘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, w
e 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.