The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again! (16 page)

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.

He walked round the minibus and set to work on the wheel on the driver’s side. For some reason, the bolts here were even rustier and he had to really exert himself to loosen them. He
panted. No, never again would he set his foot inside the Employment Office, he was too proud for that, he must get a job some other way. But there was no need to panic, he was fully occupied with
doing little jobs for his mum. And Christina gave him a handful of thousand-kronor notes now and then as if they were merely a carton of tissues. He couldn’t deny that it was hard to explain
to his wife and mates what he actually did, and he was afraid that the bubble would burst. If only he could get a bit more cash, he could perhaps start a private home-care service. Nowadays the
local councils used consultants who taught the municipal home-care departments how to cut down on service for local clients. Yes, indeed, that was what they called them nowadays – people who
needed care were called clients. But with his own home-care service he wanted to give them all friendly and generous care. He certainly wouldn’t turn it all into a question of trying to cut
costs as much as possible, like the councils did now. But until he had gathered together enough capital to start up, he would have to go on helping with crimes. Anders got up and rubbed his back.
Two wheels to go. The next time, he would take the minibus to a garage.

The lamp on the desk next to the computer was still turned on, but Chief Inspector Blomberg was sleeping deeply. During the night he had done so many searches on the Internet
that he had eventually nodded off to sleep at his desk. His cat, Einstein, had then jumped up from his basket and laid down on the keyboard, where he had spent the rest of the night. Now the
black-and-white cat arched its back and stretched out so that yet another row of Zs showed up on the screen. After many hours of delightful sleep and licking of paws and fur, there were also
several hundred Xs, Qs and semi-colons, although Z was, for some reason, the letter that occurred the most. Einstein’s favourite position was to lie down with his tummy on all the letters
including the full stop and semicolon, and comfortably park his tail on Enter. This could cause a lot of problems for the chief inspector but Blomberg had such a soft spot for the animal that he
allowed it to keep him company while he worked. Blomberg was usually very careful to keep the cat away from the desk and close the computer room before he went to bed, something he had made a habit
of since the cat on one occasion had put his left paw on the letter Ö and then, purring, pressed the key thousands of times. But that evening, the cat had been free to do what it wanted.
Einstein yawned widely, stretched out so that the letters Å, Ä and Ö were all pressed at the same time, and then jumped down onto the chief inspector’s stomach and then to the
floor. Blomberg woke up with a start.

With wide-open eyes he stared at the computer screen and tried to interpret the secret codes before he fathomed that it was Einstein who was responsible. Swearing, he got up, let the cat out and
then spent a long while tidying up before he could get back to his own notes. Blomberg rubbed his eyes. Now, what had he been busy doing? Yes, some time ago he had of course transferred money from
the Police Pension Fund to his own shadow Environment and Senior Service Fund. There was almost two hundred million in his fund now, but even so he wanted more. The trouble was that there had been
no activity at all for quite a while in that Las Vegas account. Could it be a mafia account that was only activated after they carried out a crime? Something that the mafia used? He must have
stumbled across some sort of criminal activity. After all, who could lay their hands on so much money?

Blomberg started to sweat. What would happen when they started to look for their missing money? They would, of course, trace it to his computer, seek him out and then . . . Bang! He must get rid
of his MacBook immediately and transform the stolen, black money into white money as quickly as possible – because white money was legal, while black money was dirty, even though it kept the
economy running. Blomberg shuddered at his own thoughts. He was heading at high speed straight into the shady underworld.

Blomberg thought about it. As soon as possible, he ought to place those stolen millions somewhere sensible. Shares or horses? He had already sent some of the millions to Beylings, the lawyers,
to get help with his tax debts. But the rest? The chief inspector got up and started to walk round the room, stopped at the bookcase and ran his fingers over the files. This was where he kept
secret copies of the criminal cases he had been involved in. He saw the investigations as trophies from his successful life fighting crime. Absentmindedly, he picked up one of the files and started
thumbing through it. Without thinking he sifted through all the old reports, letters and invitations. There were the stylish invitation cards that invited him to parties and fancy dinners at
Beylings. Yes, the legal firm’s logo with the star and the scales of justice turned up several times. His tired brain tried to make the connection. Of course, he had often been invited there
during the years he worked on economic crime. They had tried to bribe him many times. The legal firm didn’t just work with tax questions, they were also those people who stretched the law and
helped finance sharks to turn black and grey money white. How many swindlers had the Beylings lawyers helped to escape justice? The firm now had even more work as the state had sold off the
taxpayers’ assets. Housing, retirement homes, schools, dispensing chemists and so on. Cunning mercenary types had bought up some state-run facility for 600,000 or 800,000 kronor and then in
turn resold it for millions more. The profit had to be hidden away so that it wasn’t too blatant. The lawyers knew how to do that.