The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again! (15 page)

Upon hearing the shrieking alarm, Anna-Greta immediately pressed the quick-dial button to Anders and Emma after which she took a few steps towards the door, fell again, then put her hand to her
chest, screaming. When she saw the first onlooker approaching, Anna-Greta squeezed a prepared bag of blood under her jumper and let the blood slowly seep out between her fingers. Then Martha phoned
the police. She used the same pay-as-you-go SIM-card again, to make sure the police would disregard the call. She knew only too well that after the third phone call of the day, they would not be
interested in what she had to say.

‘I bet one thousand kronor that the police won’t come this time,’ she mumbled to herself, but became silent when the police switchboard answered the call.

‘The alarm has gone off at Handelsbanken on the corner of Karlavägen and Sturegatan. You must come immediately,’ said Martha. ‘It’s a real bank robbery, the sort you
see on the TV you see, Constable.’

She elaborated about all the villains who must have forced their way into the bank and how much money they could get their hands on with such a crime, and then she ended the call and
fast-dialled Securitas.

‘This is Clara Johansson from the Internal Accounting department at Handelsbanken on the corner of Karlavägen and Sturegatan,’ said Martha with a superior voice. ‘My code
is 543JKL14 – yes, you’ve got that among your papers. Now the alarm has gone off again, the third time in a short period. This is a false alarm, I must inform you. You’ve already
been here several times. Securitas is really ripping us off. Just because somebody has damaged the door, it shouldn’t mean that we have to pay thousands of kronor for you to come and switch
the alarm off every time it goes off. We’re not going to pay for yet another visit. I’m going to personally turn the alarm off!’

Martha didn’t know if it would work; it was simply an extra security measure. Regardless, they would have at least five minutes and that should suffice.

‘Right, let’s go,’ said Martha. She took Brains’s hand in hers and squeezed it hard. ‘Now don’t get nervous, we’re going to manage this. Nobody in the
history of the world has committed a crime like this. The police won’t have a clue as to what’s happened!’

‘Well, my dear, let’s hope so,’ said Brains and he tried to sound bold but his voice was shaky.

He had hardly said the words before they heard an ambulance approaching with its sirens wailing. Anders and Emma were on their way. The sound came closer and soon the ambulance screeched to a
halt just outside the bank entrance. Martha and Brains went to meet it, and a few steps behind them came Rake and the others. Anders and Emma, disguised as ambulance paramedics, hurried out with
stretchers and blankets, and with Brains’s help they discreetly picked the lock of the entrance door.

The stretchers looked just like any old ambulance stretcher, but if anyone had decided to take a closer look, they would have discovered the slight mounds in the middle. Under the carefully
folded blankets lay two fully dressed shop-window mannequins, with overcoats, boots and all. Anders and Emma hurried inside the bank, and Martha just had time to notice the door mat with its
message WELCOME TO HANDELSBANKEN. She smiled, muttered a ‘So nice of them indeed!’ and hurried in the direction of the bank vault. The alarm was still deafeningly loud, but not loud
enough to block out the sound of detonations from the train-tunnel builders somewhere underneath them. At that very same moment, there was also a series of powerful explosions down in the vault
where Brains had lit a smoke bomb and some very large Christmas crackers. Grinning red Santa Claus figures, blackened candles and bits of paper flew in every direction while the smoke slowly spread
out. Brains wasn’t as good at pyrotechnics as he was at mechanics, but he could read technical drawings and the charges inside the Christmas crackers did the trick. The iron bars and the door
with its steel hinges fell to the ground with a crash. Martha, Rake and Christina – coughing somewhat – made their way down the stairs and into the vault. Without wasting any time, they
quickly collected the money from the security boxes which lay broken on the floor.

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.

‘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.

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.