The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again!

by Ingelman-Sundberg, Catharina

  ‘That’s true, but sometimes it pays to think a step further,’ said Martha, looking carefully around her. ‘Now we’ll go up with the mannequin to our dear neighbours. It’s what Mad Angels wanted and I think it would be wisest for us to do that. I promise you, this is going to be the best thing for us too. Trust me.’

  Anna-Greta opened her mouth to say something, but stopped herself at the last second when she saw Martha’s determined expression. Reluctantly, she withdrew her hands from the bundles of banknotes and straightened her back. Then she looked on sadly as her friend screwed the head back on again and put the mannequin back in the wrapping, after which Brains balanced the package on his Zimmer frame and set off up towards the yellow house. With five million kronor.

  Since the League of Pensioners had advertised on the Internet, people had been phoning like mad. Anna-Greta had written: ‘Final sale from the estate of a collector’, which was the sort of thing that attracted people’s attention. Car or boat, motorbike or tractor. It didn’t seem to make any difference what she had advertised, every item that they had put on the Internet site had resulted in a swarm of eager buyers. To keep some sort of order during the day, they had taken turns to man the telephone and then planned the visits so that not all the speculators would turn up at the same time. It was a good strategy, but they doubted whether it would actually work.

  ‘It’s going to be a long day,’ said Martha, and she put out four thermos flasks with newly brewed coffee in the lilac arbour. They had eaten a fortifying breakfast, and they would need the coffee and snacks to keep up their strength during the day. The cake tin was full of wafers and on a bread board next to it there was some newly baked bread. Besides that, they had stocked up with several kilos of apples, oranges and bananas, and for Rake – who preferred sweets – there were several packets of his favourites. For Brains, she had put out some Fazer’s lemon liquorice and a cheesecake with strawberries that she had made in the morning. Love evidently gave you oceans of energy. She had never before even dreamed of putting on an apron and baking. But since she had been engaged, she just loved it when Brains was happy.

  It was lovely weather and there was no wind at all; the water was like a mirror and out beyond the bay you could see birds high in the sky. The first of the huge ferries from Finland was on its way into Stockholm and beside their own jetty there were three large luxury boats: the Pettersson boat, a yacht and a motor cruiser. Two luxury yachts that there hadn’t been room for were moored out in the bay. Thankfully, Anders and Emma had promised to help with the selling and that was a good thing, too, as it would make everything more credible when so many objects were to be sold. It was only Rake who thought their presence was unnecessary – as far as the boats were concerned, at any rate, because that was something he could best take care of himself. Being a former seaman was one thing, selling boats discreetly was quite another. Christina took a wafer and looked as if she was pondering something, then she said:

  ‘You know what, I’ve been thinking about this. How can we explain that we own all of this?’ She looked out across the garden and the field behind where the boats and cars had been parked so close to each other that you could hardly walk between them.

  ‘Somebody has left it all to us in their will,’ said Anna-Greta. ‘After all, we wrote in the adverts that they came from an estate. We could have inherited all this from a close relative who owned boats, car factories and the like,’ Anna-Greta went on.

  ‘That’s smart,’ Martha agreed.

  ‘What about the art?’ Christina wondered. ‘One of the paintings is a Zorn.’

  ‘We could have bought that when we were young. It’s gone up in value over the years, you know,’ said Anna-Greta.

  ‘But then surely we should have sold it via an auction chamber?’ Brains suggested.

  The discussion went back and forth while the sun rose all the higher and the League of Pensioners waited for the first customers. They discussed the different lies they could trot out – but they didn’t sound especially credible, so they decided to simply say as little as possible. Most of all, they were worried that one of the Bandangels might come home earlier than expected or that one of the customers would see through them and discover that it was all stolen property.

  ‘In the criminal world things are always a bit uncertain.’ Martha tried to smooth things over.

  ‘It’s best to just pile on the lies,’ Rake added. ‘If you tell enough lies, people will believe you.’

  ‘I suppose we could pretend that we are politicians who’ve been to nightclubs and been caught?’ Christina interjected.

  ‘Yes, exactly, and we must improvise,’ said Martha. She had hardly got the words out of her mouth before they heard sounds from down the hill. It was now eight o’clock in the morning and the first buyer of the day was on the way. Gunnar got up ready with his computer printouts and Anna-Greta had a firm grip on her notebook where she was going to tick off all the items. Like Martha, she had a belt-bag around her waist where she could put the money when people paid in cash, as well as a shoulder bag with an iPad that she and Gunnar could use to provide the bank details for larger transactions.

  The first customer was a man who wanted to buy a Bentley. Brains started up and talked so much about acceleration and horsepower that he completely forgot to sell the car, and if Martha hadn’t come and helped at the last minute, they would have missed their first sell straight away. Two motorbikes, a Jaguar and one of the boats were, however, quite easy to flog, and Martha and Anna-Greta praised the Internet.

  ‘It’s really fantastic how easy it is to sell stuff!’ Anna-Greta exclaimed, and she had to go inside and empty the overflowing belt-bag. Then she put the banknotes in envelopes marked ‘Bentley’, ‘Jaguar’, and so on, and hid the envelopes in an old trunk with linen. If there were any crooks among the customers, then they wouldn’t find the money amongst all the towels and sheets. The boats and the Bentley were, unfortunately, worth so much that they could only get a deposit and Anna-Greta had to use the iPad or give them a bank account number to pay into.

  ‘I can see from your eyes that you are honest,’ she concluded the deals, and then hoped that the buyers really would put the rest of the money into the account. When Rake was going to sell the Pettersson boat, there was some confusion, as nobody could find it. It wasn’t there any longer.

  ‘Perhaps it’s already been sold?’ Rake muttered. He hadn’t made any notes as he thought he could remember everything anyway. They had to go down to the jetty while the prospective buyer paced impatiently.

  ‘Well, you see, Pettersson boats are very much sought-after. Real veterans,’ said Rake with the look of an expert. ‘I think we had a customer here who wanted to take it for a test run.’

  ‘So when will he be coming back?’

  ‘Err, any minute now, I should think. It’s a really beautiful boat, I can tell you that. Newly varnished, the mahogany interior has been completely renovated, the brass is polished bright. In fact, I’d really like to keep it myself.’

  ‘A swindler must have gone off with it,’ said Anna-Greta fifteen minutes later when no boat had returned to the jetty. Then Martha remembered the discussion they had had about old decrepit wooden boats and she went right to the end of the jetty, put on her Polaroid glasses, and leaned over the edge. Yes, that was the explanation.

  ‘We can give you a discount,’ said Martha, pointing at the water where the Pettersson boat could be seen on the sea bed.

  ‘I’m not here to buy a bloody submarine!’ the customer hissed.

  ‘But, my good man, it hasn’t been there very long,’ Anna-Greta attempted. ‘It’s just a little wet.’

  It was not until they had radically lowered the price that a happy collector of veteran boats bought it anyway.

  The telephones rang and one car after the other was sold from the hill. Business was brisk. Veteran cars, motorbikes and Jaguars sold just as well as the paintings that Martha had found in the cabin of one of the yachts
. Besides the Zorn, there had been a Matisse there, but that wasn’t quite as easy to sell. However much Christina swore that it was genuine, people didn’t believe her.

  ‘Pull the other one; you’ve painted that yourself,’ they said and shrugged their shoulders, and Christina did actually feel rather flattered. Later, a man who had been sacked from his job as a curator at Moderna Museet came by, and he bought the painting at such a high price that Anna-Greta laughed and laughed. New customers were arriving all the time, and by the afternoon, Martha and her friends were completely exhausted. Now they started muddling up the adverts and soon they had lost track of what they had sold, and what was still for sale.

  ‘What does it matter?’ said Christina, exhilarated. ‘This is really fun and the main thing is that we get some money in.’

  ‘But selling a motorbike from the thirties as a moped isn’t very smart at all,’ said Brains, angrily.

  ‘You have the nerve to say that after calling a genuine Zorn a watercolour by an unknown artist,’ Christina was quick to counter. ‘If I hadn’t seen that, we’d have lost several million.’

  ‘No bickering, we’re doing our best. Soon we’ll have some coffee and sandwiches, with cheesecake to follow,’ Martha cut in, as she wanted to ensure that they all stayed on good terms and kept their spirits up. She tempted them with lemon wafers, too. Just that very moment, more people drove up to Myrstigen and the League of Pensioners had to take care of them. Since they’d had no time to have that fortifying afternoon coffee break, their continued sales got really confused. Anna-Greta didn’t always have time to tick off the items on her list, and sometimes Brains sold the same item twice. In a moment of weakness he was about to sell Lillemor’s car because he thought it was so ugly, but he restrained himself at the last minute when he realized it wasn’t his. But it was Rake who made the worst blunder when he nearly sold the neighbour’s horse by mistake. It was grazing in the ditch nice and peacefully and in the general rush he thought the horse was for sale too. Thankfully, Christina, who, after all, was the youngest and thus not quite so tired as the others, succeeded in preventing that sale at the last moment.

  One way or another, one expensive car and boat after the other disappeared and, by the late afternoon, the land outside the yellow house, as well as their own land, had been emptied. They were all totally exhausted and Anna-Greta’s horsey neighing laugh sounded much weaker than usual. But she was on top form, because she hadn’t handled so much money in one day for years. With a smile she put yet another envelope with banknotes into the trunk, which was an antique wooden chest from the eighteenth century, patted the lid which said ‘HOME SWEET HOME’, and exclaimed: ‘Now my trunk is full to the brim, and the money smells of lavender!’

  ‘Yes, and it’s such a delight to get back our Las Vegas money, albeit by a very roundabout route!’ said Martha. ‘Beylings only have themselves to blame for helping villains.’

  ‘Not to mention Chief Inspector Blomberg,’ Brains added.

  ‘Yes, it’s his own fault. Stealing our money like that!’ said Christina.

  ‘Can you imagine his face when he sees the empty warehouse?’ Rake smiled.

  ‘Let’s drink to that,’ Martha proposed, and the champagne came out. ‘I’d like to see the faces of the Bandangels when they come home. They can kick up as much fuss as they want, but they can’t do anything about it. Everything has gone.’

  Brains gave a slight shudder and Christina scratched with her index finger on the table top.

  ‘I am a little scared, nevertheless,’ she said in a feeble voice. ‘They give me such a strict look sometimes. What if they think all that stuff is theirs?’

  Then Rake suddenly stood up and looked quite horrified. ‘Theirs! Yes, of course. Oh heavens above! We’ve made a terrible mistake!’ he stuttered. ‘They don’t know that the goods in Beylings’ warehouse were bought with our Las Vegas money. They’re going to think we stolen it all from them.’

  ‘Oh, dear me, what a mess!’ Anna-Greta exclaimed.

  ‘Stolen from them? The thought never occurred to me. There is so much one needs to remember nowadays,’ Christina moaned.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid that this must count as yet another of our crimes,’ Brains said, with surprising calm.

  ‘Now we’re really in deep trouble,’ Rake contributed.

  ‘Perhaps it would be best if we give it all back?’ said Christina, and she looked extremely worried. ‘Or else we must think of something, and quickly too.’

  ‘Think of something? Lord, have mercy! This isn’t going to be easy.’ Anna-Greta sighed.

  ‘It’ll work out, don’t worry. I’ve got everything under control,’ said Martha, ‘Or, at any rate, I ought to have,’ she added in such a weak voice that nobody heard. ‘We’ll leave Värmdö for a while until things have calmed down.’

  ‘Are we going to leave our house?’ they cried out in unison. ‘No, we’ve got everything so nice and cosy here.’

  ‘Perhaps I ought to have said something earlier, but neither I nor Brains wanted to frighten you. We actually do have a plan.’ Martha glanced at Brains and he gave her an encouraging nod. Martha took a deep breath, put the champagne glass aside and clasped her hands in front of her. ‘Now listen to this. It doesn’t sound good, but everything is perhaps not quite as dark as it looks.’

  The five of them and Gunnar were so preoccupied that they didn’t notice Lillemor. She had come home from her Tarot séance at a friend’s and was walking up the hill looking really rather content. She was a bit unsteady on her feet and, if truth be told, she had enjoyed many glasses of wine, but it didn’t look at all the same here as it did yesterday. The car that had been parked next to her fence had gone, as had Tompa’s pride and joy, a Cruiser 16. It took a while before she realized what had changed. At first she stared once, then several more times, and she still couldn’t believe her eyes. To make sure, she walked up to the Bandangels’ yard to see if the goods were up there. But they weren’t. With shaking hands she opened her handbag and pulled out her mobile phone. It was hard to press the right buttons and her voice sounded decidedly slurred, but she did manage to say:

  ‘Tompa, you know what? You’re not going to believe this, but the yard and garden are empty. All your stuff has gone!’

  Then she fell into bed, dizzy and drunk and quite lost to the world.

  48

  It is decidedly unwise to steal from a notorious motorbike gang. Anna-Greta, Gunnar, Christina and Rake had gathered around the kitchen table, horrified at the realization of what they had just done. They tried to calm themselves with a cup of hot chocolate, and Martha and Brains tried to console and encourage them as best they could, but they, too, understood that the situation was serious. The most likely outcome was that the Bandangels would think that their nearest neighbours had stolen the bikers’ property. So now all the members of the League of Pensioners must be prepared to flee, perhaps even to pack all their stuff and leave the old house for good.

  ‘I’m sorry, but it looks as if we must get out of here, whether we want to or not,’ Martha summarized the situation, and she gave the others a serious look. ‘And what’s more, I don’t think we’ve got much time to do it in. But you don’t have to worry. Brains and I have arranged a place where we can hide for the time being, and Anders and Emma will certainly give us some help.’

  ‘Where will we move to? You must tell us,’ Rake grumbled.

  Martha lifted up her floral-patterned cloth bag and searched for the folder. Although it was plastic, the papers inside had got all wrinkled. She had sniffled and cried a little because she, too, liked living in the old house, and now she had a bad conscience for forcing her friends to move on once again. In future, she must plan things better. If they were going to commit more crimes, then she must make sure it didn’t lead to such turmoil in their life.

  ‘It is a pity that we must leave Värmdö, but we can come back again later. Anyhow, just have a look at this place; it isn’t bad at all, don’t yo
u think?’ Martha said, opening the folder and pulling out some papers. ‘Brains and I looked on the Internet and we found this. I think the prospects are good that we can stay hidden yet still be quite comfortable.’ She unfolded a map on the table and laid out some photos that showed both the house and the area surrounding it.

  The others were a bit grumpy because they hadn’t been involved in planning this from the beginning, but then they realized that they had had more than their hands full as it was, and that perhaps it was, after all, for the best that Martha and Brains had planned for them. Towards midnight, the friends had agreed as to what course of action they should take, and could allow themselves a few hours of sleep. Now it was a question of sink or swim.

  ‘We must pack all our stuff secretly so that the Bandangels don’t realize that we are leaving. And not only that, we should have everything ready before they come back,’ said Christina, a tremble in her voice.

  ‘Yes, indeed, but we’ll manage that,’ said Rake, and he patted her on the cheek. His little ‘affair’ with Lillemor, and Christina’s strong reaction, had made him want to look after her better. He had been egoistical and stupid, and even though it had been exciting to be with Lillemor, he didn’t want to risk losing Christina for good. Of course he liked his Christina best! He always had done. Strange that she couldn’t grasp that!

  Early next morning, they started to pack. A red-eyed Anna-Greta had been forced to abandon her vinyl record collection and even though they had promised that she could take one box of her favourites, that didn’t really help much. After all, she had twenty large boxes full of LPs that she would now have to leave behind in the old house.

  ‘When everything’s calmed down we can come back and fetch the boxes,’ Martha consoled her. ‘Besides, we’re moving far from Stockholm, so you’ll be able to devote lots of time to Gunnar. That will be nice, won’t it?’

  Reluctantly, Anna-Greta agreed to pack all her records away in the cellar, and then muttered something about how criminal activities had started to destroy her private life. She and Gunnar got on so nicely in the old house and they had looked forward to many evenings together where they could have eaten well, surfed on the Internet and listened to their records together. He had introduced her to Jussi Björling and Harry Brandelius, as well as Teleman’s and Verdi’s fantastic compositions. Now she would have to put it all in the cellar and she could not even take her old treasury of horn music with her. At the next meeting she would raise the question of their private lives and insist on lowering the level of their criminal ambitions. They couldn’t just keep going on with robberies and writing ransom demands. Of course they ought to do everything they could for those who found themselves in difficult circumstances, but surely they didn’t have to be in such a hurry like stressed teenagers.