The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again!

by Ingelman-Sundberg, Catharina

  Outside the bank, Anna-Greta lay with blood on her hands and waited for Gunnar – who was an honorary recruit for the League of Pensioners. Could she rely on him? Would he understand just how important he was for the success of the whole coup? She jerked a little for the sake of appearances, and with a hairpin put another hole in the bag of blood inside her jumper. At last she saw him running down the pavement. She closed her eyes and hoped he would do mouth-to-mouth on her. Instead he arrived and gave her a brisk thump on her chest, using both hands to press on her ribcage, which was the latest thing they taught you on First Aid courses. The bag of blood split and her ribs got some quite rough treatment but that didn’t stop him. Gunnar wasn’t being romantic at all, he could have resuscitated an Egyptian mummy.

  ‘Gunnar, take it easy,’ she gurgled. ‘I’m still alive!’

  But her beloved didn’t hear her, he was focused on his task. He had clearly been watching too many of those catastrophe films on TV. When she couldn’t take it any longer, Anna-Greta threw out her arms and hissed in her most cutting voice:

  ‘You men always have to take things too far. Simple mouth-to-mouth would have been sufficient.’

  More spectators now gathered outside the bank in tight groups. This has to work, Anna-Greta thought to herself. She groaned a little – partly because her ribs now ached, and partly for appearances – but she stopped immediately when Gunnar finally pressed his mouth against hers in a new resuscitation attempt.

  Inside the back vault, the others were toiling away as best they could. Martha had pulled the blankets off the stretchers and uncovered the mannequins. She quickly unscrewed their heads so that Brains and Rake could fill the dummies with money. They all worked quickly and knew exactly what they should do because they had practised this several times back at their house, although the real thing was a lot more difficult.

  Their progress was slower than expected, and Martha became all the more nervous. The smoke made their eyes smart, and outside things were getting increasingly chaotic. Finally, Brains and Rake pushed the last of the banknotes down the mannequins and screwed the heads back on again.

  ‘Next stop – A and E!’ instructed Martha and she nodded to Anders. He quickly put the first mannequin on the stretcher, covered it with the blanket again and then, together with Emma, carried it out to the ambulance. When Emma and Anders came back in to fetch the second mannequin, the head fell off. They were running out of time. Martha screwed the head back on again which still left a bit of a gap, and Rake lent her his cravat to cover it. Then Anders and Emma covered that mannequin with a blanket as well and hurried out of the bank with the stretcher.

  ‘Make way! Make way!’ Anders shouted out when he and Emma pushed through to the ambulance, but in the rush they carelessly let a corner of the stretcher bang against the ambulance door and one of the mannequin’s shoes fell to the ground. Emma quickly bent down and picked it up, threw it inside the ambulance and slammed the door. Martha, Brains and Rake, who were now also pretending to be injured, struggled across to the ambulance but were turned away by Emma.

  ‘Wait here, there isn’t room for you, I’ll fetch the ambulance bus,’ she said and rushed off across to the National Library where they had parked it. While Emma fetched the big vehicle, the crowd grew bigger. Anna-Greta whimpered a little more in front of these spectators, and Martha and Brains moaned and groaned loudly too. Rake, however, kept on nagging about how he must get his cravat back, but just as he was about to protest even more, they heard three quick toots from a car horn. Emma hadn’t bothered driving on the gravel paths. She had gone straight over the park lawns and now the military vehicle was right opposite the bank on the other side of the street.

  Anna-Greta struggled onto her feet and, supported by Gunnar, she tottered across the road and into the big vehicle, closely followed by Martha, Brains and Rake. Gunnar, who wasn’t injured at all, pretended to be a close relative and entered the ambulance, closing the doors before he sat with the others. When Anders drove past in the ambulance with its wailing siren, Emma pulled out behind him with the military ambulance bus. A large cloud of black diesel exhaust followed in her wake. Then both vehicles drove at great speed towards Huddinge Hospital. It was a bit further away than Karolinska, and there wasn’t so much security there.

  18

  ‘Here it is!’ Anders shouted out, as he turned into the Huddinge Hospital entrance. His hands were clammy and he was breathing rather heavily but he forced himself to drive calmly and carefully as if he was a proper ambulance driver and not a villain fleeing from a crime scene. In the car park he spotted the minibus belonging to the League of Pensioners which he and Emma had driven there earlier in the day. He slowed down and parked right next to it. Soon afterwards the ambulance bus parked up too. Emma got out and opened the back doors to both vehicles and signalled to the others to keep quiet. Under the cover of darkness, Emma and Anders then unloaded their ‘stretcher cases’. Inside the minibus, Martha and Christina helped to seat the mannequins on the two extra seats that had been specially installed. They fastened their seat belts and patted them on the cheek for appearances. One of the mannequins had again lost a boot, but Martha quickly put it back on again. They mustn’t risk the success of the entire coup by being careless about details.

  In the ambulance bus they were all busy too. Anna-Greta wiped off most of the blood that she and Martha had collected in plastic bags at a Värmdö slaughterhouse. Despite being in a hurry, she couldn’t help smiling at the thought of the confusion at the Forensics Lab if they tried to do a DNA test. The blood came from lame racehorses that had been slaughtered during the week and, however thorough the tests were, they would all show the same result: the DNA samples from the badly bleeding lady on the pavement outside the bank came from a horse. So Anna-Greta felt calm; she might laugh like a horse, but the police wouldn’t be able to trace her.

  Martha and the others cleaned the ambulance as best they could before Anders finally drove it back to the parking area for the hospital’s emergency vehicles. It was a bit more complicated to deal with the military ambulance bus, but the League of Pensioners had a plan for that too. When they were all seated in their minibus together with the mannequins, Martha happily steered out onto the 222 towards Värmdö, while Anders and Emma took the ambulance bus and drove back into the city again. At a well-chosen place under the Essinge motorway they stopped, tidied things up and changed their clothes. When they had finished, they even had time for a short nap. The alarm clock on Anders’ mobile phone rang at 4.45 and he got into the driver’s seat again.

  The stars were clearly visible in the night sky as they drove the ambulance bus back to the barracks at Karlberg Castle. Anders had done his military training there, and it was easy for him to find his way around. At Ekelund Bridge he paused at the barrier and then turned into the park. The engine ticked over as Emma jumped out and quickly and opened the gate with a demagnetized old credit card. Then she got back in next to Anders who calmly put the vehicle into first gear and drove up to the car park. He parked the bus at an angle, as if he had been a bit drunk, turned the engine off and left the keys in the ignition. Before the two of them got out, they looked back inside the bus.

  ‘Does it look convincing?’ Anders asked, taking his gloves off.

  ‘Perfect. I bet you anything that the army’s ambulance vehicles really do look like this sometimes.’ Emma looked at the beer cans and whisky bottles on the floor, some empty and some still half-full. Emma had spiced up the scene with some mascara and lipstick on the front seat and a pair of knickers under one of the other seats. Anders and Emma smiled, pulled their hats down over their ears and ran off towards the metro station.

  19

  It was now quite late, and Jörgen and Tompa had already downed six beers each. During the evening they had painted the bar stools in the club premises, fried some juicy steaks, heated up some frozen chips in the oven, watched TV, challenged each other in various computer games, and talked about chicks.
Now they were getting rather sleepy and weren’t entirely sober either. A sweaty Tompa opened the doors to the balcony to let in some fresh air. With a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he looked out across the moon-lit landscape. The trees looked black and abandoned sticking up out of the blueish white snow, and the sea looked like an endless field that disappeared in a grey horizon. He was just thinking how fantastic the archipelago was at this time of the year, when the sound of a car startled him. A Volkswagen minibus! He heard voices and car doors slam. He withdrew into the house and closed the balcony doors. Then he walked across to the window and looked out. Well now, it was the group of old people coming home, but at this time of night? And what on earth were they doing? It looked as if they were carrying something. Tompa pressed his nose against the window.

  ‘They’re taking corpses into the earth cellar.’

  ‘Cool it, man! You shouldn’t have had that last beer,’ Jörgen called out from inside the room. He yawned and continued to play his computer game.

  ‘Have a look yourself! This is just unbelievable!’

  Jörgen Smäck grudgingly got up, put his computer game down and went and stood next to Tompa.

  ‘It’ll be nothing to get worked up about,’ he started saying, but soon changed his mind. ‘What the hell are they carrying?’

  ‘Yeah, right, do you see what I mean now?’

  Outside their neighbour’s house, the old lady called Martha could be seen helping two of her friends carry a stiff corpse wearing a coat and boots. The legs of the corpse were dragging along the ground. Suddenly they dropped the corpse and the man they had nicknamed ‘Super-Grandpa’ started gesticulating wildly. He then went and fetched his Zimmer frame. When he got back, they all helped to push the torso of the corpse over the basket on the Zimmer frame which they then pushed across to the cellar. When the corpse had finally been stuffed away inside the cellar, Super-Grandpa closed the door, locked it, and then they all went inside the house.

  Tompa put his hand on his forehead and gasped for breath. ‘Have they murdered someone? Maybe with poison – how else could they do it? But if they . . .’

  ‘You didn’t drink any of their milk?’

  ‘No! It’s still in the fridge. But seriously, what are they up to? What if there are more bodies down there?’

  Tompa looked down at the big old house. At first, he had been pleased to have a gang of harmless pensioners as neighbours, but now he was feeling uneasy. As soon as they could, they ought to go down there and take a look inside the cellar to see what those idiots were up to. With determined steps, Tompa went into the kitchen, opened the fridge and took out the carton of milk. He opened it, sniffed at the contents and then poured it all down the sink. You could never be too careful.

  Martha and the gang had taken off their coats and hung up the keys in the key box. They were all a little shaky and high on adrenaline. They had succeeded again!

  ‘Let’s celebrate!’ Christina chirped happily. And even though they were all tired, they took each other by the hand and carried out a sort of improvised dance in a ring around the kitchen table. Then Christina started to sing the song of the robbers in Kamomilla town, after which they all cheered. In an atmosphere of great jollity they sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘We pulled it off!’ Anna-Greta proclaimed. ‘Soon we’ll have so much money that we can open our own bank.’

  ‘Not another bank, my dear,’ said Martha and she fetched a bottle of champagne and six glasses. ‘There are more than enough banks already.’

  ‘Yes, but it is such an incredibly profitable business. When things are going well, you take all the money yourself, and when they aren’t going well, you demand that the state forks out. Well, we can do that too.’ Anna-Greta neighed in pleasure. ‘Then we can open lots of investment funds and ask people to invest their savings there. It is so wonderful to watch the capital grow. Let’s see now, something connected with the environment and climate . . .’ Anna-Greta was talking faster and faster as she became more and more carried away by her idea.

  ‘No, no! We shall make do with the money we have. We are not going to become like those finance sharks who just want to see their capital grow. We are going to do something sensible with the money!’

  ‘Like what?’ Rake wondered. ‘Think about our millions in that drainpipe. They’re still there, getting mouldy.’

  He was referring to a ransom sum that the League of Pensioners had demanded in exchange for some paintings from the National Museum. When they found themselves in a precarious position, they had hidden the money in a drainpipe at the Grand Hotel and before they had fled from Sweden they had tipped off the police about the hidden booty. But as the authorities had taken it to be a bad joke and not done anything, all the money was probably still there. The League of Pensioners had talked about hiring a Skylift in order to retrieve the money from the drainpipe but Anna-Greta, who was a careful spender, had said that sooner or later the hotel would be renovated and then all they would need to do would be to pick the old drainpipe up from a container, and that wouldn’t cost anything. So for the time being they had not done anything about it. Besides, as Martha said: It is better to have money in a drainpipe than in a bank.

  ‘To get back to the question of the money from the bank robbery. I think we should donate it straight away so that there is no risk of us losing it,’ said Brains.

  ‘Exactly!’ Martha exclaimed in delight, and she downed the contents of her champagne glass so quickly that she started choking. Not until Brains had thumped her back a few times could she carry on. ‘I know what. Do you remember von Rosen’s bombing raids over Ethiopia? When he bombed them with food from his aeroplane, to make sure that the people who were really starving would actually get help? Well, we can do the same. Except we could drop banknotes!’

  ‘Excellent idea, and that way we avoid all the go-betweens,’ said Christina who had learned how they do things in the world of finance.

  ‘Yes, that’s it; if we invest our cash in shares or investment funds or ask the bank to look after it, it will only cost us lots of money,’ Gunnar said.

  ‘Great idea, and we wouldn’t have any storage costs either,’ Anna-Greta chipped in. ‘You’re a genius, Martha.’

  The room was filled with such genuine appreciation that Martha found herself blushing. Brains held her hand under the table and she couldn’t resist leaning her head against his shoulder. It immediately felt like a delight to be alive.

  ‘Mind you, we can’t rent a plane and shower old people’s homes with banknotes. We must think up another way,’ said Gunnar and he sipped his champagne.

  ‘We can compete with the ice-cream trucks,’ Brains suggested. ‘Then we can play jingles and drive out to where the people who need the money are.’

  ‘Or why not pretend to be the official bailiffs? We can say we are from the National Enforcement Agency. They can get in anywhere,’ said Anna-Greta.

  ‘Or perhaps Jehovah’s Witnesses?’ Christina thought out loud, remembering what things were like in her Nonconformist church childhood back home in Jönköping.

  ‘Usch, we don’t have to make things so complicated. Can’t we just be our usual pensioners’ choir, visiting the old and poor and singing songs?’ Martha suggested.

  ‘And leave behind a shopping trolley with banknotes that have the same numbers as the ones stolen from Handelsbanken? Then they would trace us straight away,’ Rake warned.

  ‘There, you see, there are disadvantages to being rich. And there are advantages to being poor too,’ Martha said. ‘Then you never need to worry about what to do with your money.’

  ‘That was the daftest thing I’ve heard,’ the others said with one voice. And you say that now, after all the work we’ve put in!’

  Silence followed. It was obvious that they were all very tired and that the lack of brilliant ideas was because they had more bubbly in their heads than good suggestions.

  ‘Champagne straight after
a bank robbery does make you a bit lethargic,’ Martha said after a while, and she smothered a yawn. ‘We’ve got our millions that we want to give away, but the banknotes are numbered and they mustn’t be traced back to us. It is more complicated to be a criminal than you might think.’

  The others nodded sleepily.

  ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow,’ Anna-Greta muttered and she had hardly finished saying that before the chairs could be heard scraping as they all got up. Yawning, but in good spirits, they navigated towards the stairs. Christina stopped next to the bottom step and clapped her hands. Her eyes were sparkling.

  ‘Isn’t it just fantastic! Several newly robbed millions. Now we’re really back in action!’

  The morning after the big Handelsbanken robbery, Anders felt absolutely exhausted, but he still had things to do. Reluctantly he opened the back door and got the new tyres out. Martha had told him that it was best to change the tyres on their minibus so that the tyre tracks couldn’t be traced. He shivered, got out the jack, the rim wrench and his work gloves. He sighed as he looked at the back wheel. The rims looked rusty and they needed changing too but, of course, he didn’t have to do that now. He yawned and started to jack up the back wheel. The jack squeaked. That too had seen better days and needed oiling at any rate. Everything was getting old nowadays. And that included him. He still hadn’t found a new job; when you were in your fifties it evidently wasn’t so easy. Did you have to be thirty, or thirty-five, nowadays to get a job? He unscrewed the four bolts, changed the wheel and then tightened the bolts with the rim wrench. Then he fetched the next wheel. He had been sacked from his job at the Employment Office, and that still smarted. The reorganization, the talk of how some of the staff were superfluous, the way his boss told him that he no longer had a job. Anders remembered everything from that afternoon meeting. And since then he had applied for several jobs. He had been asked to attend a couple of interviews, but nothing ever came of them. You could almost say that was even more humiliating. Having worked in the Employment Office, he of all people ought to know how to get a job. Try to find out what type of personality you have, see which sort of job would suit you best and test your capacity . . . He thought about all those empty phrases he had used in his pep talks to people who came to the Employment Office during his years there. One year had passed, and he was just as unemployed as the day his boss had given him a leaving present – a bottle of wine and a plant in a pot.