The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again! (24 page)

‘Yeah, right, let’s do that!’ Tompa agreed.

Lennart grabbed the tablecloth from the closest table so that glasses and plates went flying in all directions.

‘This’ll do nicely,’ he said and handed it to Tompa, who enthusiastically went up to the mike and explained the new system.

Brains and Rake tried again to back out with the mannequin but then came to a halt once more. The drummer produced another loud roll of the drums and when he finished, Tompa went across and put
the cloth over the prize boxes. The atmosphere grew all the more tense because everybody knew that there were several boxes of booze, but also lots of other prizes that they hadn’t a clue
about.

Now things hotted up in the clubhouse. As soon as a winning number was called out, a drunken biker tottered up to the stage, pointed out his prize and, to the accompaniment of loud cheering,
opened the box. Every bottle of booze was applauded, and the guests were singing and jeering at full volume. After a while, more and more prizes turned up from the other boxes too, mobile
telephones, an iPad, a gift voucher for an electric scooter and lots of other stuff. The party revellers could hardly restrain themselves. A clean-shaven guy with a ponytail pointed to a large
rectangular shape under the cloth, pulled out the box, and ripped off the tape.

‘What the . . .? Support stockings!’

‘Yeah, right, have you no sense of humour?’ Tompa smoothed it over. Laughter and jeers continued to fill the clubhouse while he wondered what he should do. Where did that come from?
The next moment there was a violent roar and he twisted round. Lennart, the vice-president, had won a box too and now stood with a folding walking stick in his hand, and it had a flower pattern on
it too.

‘Is this meant to be funny?’ Lennart shouted.

Tompa went up to the drummer and asked him to end the raffle draw, but the president of Mad Angels, Olle Marling, had already got a winning number. He shouted out:

‘I won, I won!’

‘It depends on which number you’ve got,’ said Tompa, and he tried to calm him.

‘The winning number, of course,’ said Olle Marling, ripping the wrapping paper off the largest box that he had found under the cloth.

Rake and Brains looked at each other and with the mannequin under their arms they moved a little further towards the door. Out of the corners of their eyes they saw the Mad Angels leader dip
into the box and pull out the contents. There wasn’t so much light on the stage and the flashes from the disco globe made it hard to see what he had won. But then came the first restrained
giggles, which gradually grew louder. Then the cheers erupted. He had won five hundred incontinence pads. For men.

‘Oh, I see, you’ve been to your urologist,’ came the comment from a heavily made-up girl who stood close by. She was a nurse and had long been pissed off because Olle, the Mad
Angels leader, had dumped her.

‘What did you say?’ he roared out and delved into the box once more. He pulled out another fistful of Lady Wings, Incontinence pads for women. The crowd couldn’t restrain
themselves any longer. The roars of laughter echoed throughout the clubhouse. Never had any member of Mad Angels been so ridiculed. Tompa turned pale, and brought the raffle to an end. What had
they actually stolen?

‘What are you laughing at?’ Olle Marling bellowed.

‘It was just a little practical joke.’ Tompa tried to smooth things over. Then the ex-girlfriend leaned forward and whispered something in Olle’s ear. Suddenly, the Mad Angels
president understood what a fool they had made of him. His entire body was shaking in anger, and, blinded by fury, he rushed down from the stage. Tompa backed away but Rake didn’t have
time.

‘You idiots and your raffle! Is this meant to be funny? Give me the shop dummy! I’m going to take something with me!’ he roared, grabbing the mannequin and storming out of the
building. He almost knocked Brains and Rake over on his way out, and it took them a while to compose themselves and regain their balance.

‘Err, that’s our mannequin…!’ they shouted as loud as they could.

But Olle Marling didn’t hear them. He was already on the way to his bike with the dummy in his arms.

Brains and Rake hurried after him. They got to the front steps just in time to see the Mad Angels president accelerate away on his bike down the hill. ‘Munin’ was tied on in a
sitting position, without a helmet and with the red shawl blowing in the wind.

Olle Marling drove at full throttle towards the direction of the town with the mannequin on the back of his bike. Not far from the clubhouse in Orming, he forgot the speed limit. When he turned
off from the main road he was doing at least a hundred kilometres an hour. The police radar check was hidden out of sight and he discovered it too late. A well-built, uniformed police officer waved
him into the lay-by and Olle had no choice but to stop. He swore and tried to keep his face turned away so as not to blow alcohol fumes right in the face of the authorities. The policeman lit up
his face with a torch.

‘How fast were you going then?’

‘About fifty, no more.’

‘Lucky for you that our radar apparatus is a bit wonky, otherwise you’d be done for speeding. That must have been at least a hundred. Right, blow into this!’ The policeman was
holding a breathalyser tube.

‘No, I’m stone sober,’ Olle protested.

‘And you expect me to believe that? Blow!’

He held out the breathalyser. Olle’s lips tensed. He didn’t know how he could get out of this. Should he fill his mouth with tobacco, chew some Vicks throat pastilles? But he
didn’t have anything with him that could fool the apparatus.

‘What a lot of midges!’ exclaimed Olle, swearing and waving his hands.

The policeman looked around and, somewhat confused, started waving his hand too. Then Olle leaned forward and made sure the policeman’s hand hit him.

Olle exclaimed and dropped the breathalyser which landed on the Tarmac. He swiftly allowed his bike’s front wheel to roll over it.

‘What happened?’ said the policeman. ‘You hit it so it went flying,’ replied Olle, rolling the front wheel back and picking up the squashed apparatus. ‘Sorry, not
my fault,’ he went on, handing over the broken bits.

‘Then it will have to be a blood test! And hello, what have we got here? Your mate hasn’t got a helmet on. That’ll be a fine.’

‘It’s just a—’

The policeman pulled his report pad out.

‘Have a look for yourself!’ Olle snapped as he unscrewed the head. The policeman almost fainted.

‘Not easy to see that in the dark,’ he mumbled and put his report pad back in his pocket. And now he had completely forgotten the blood test. Olle grinned widely, put the head back
on, raised his hand in farewell and set off again.

In police headquarters at Kungsholmen, rapid steps could be heard and a door was roughly pulled open with unnecessary force. Chief Inspector Blomberg swore like a trooper and
slammed the door behind him. Had the people at the forensics lab been out in the sun too long? He had been waiting for the analysis of the blood stains outside the Handelsbanken branch and was
hoping for a breakthrough in the investigation. But now? To start with, they’d taken a very long time to test the samples, and now, when finally they sent an answer, it was ludicrous. His
hand shook as he held the telephone.

‘DNA from a horse! What are you playing at, you nitwits! We want the lab reports on the blood from the Handelsbanken robbery, not from the Solvalla racecourse!’ he shouted.

A friendly female voice asked him to behave like a gentleman when he spoke to her. Then she described the blood samples, the reliability of the tests and all the work they had put in when doing
the analysis. She stubbornly maintained that the blood had come from the pavement outside the bank, and his protests got him nowhere. Before the end of the call he was absolutely convinced that
somebody was playing a joke on him. An old, grey-haired policeman, on the wrong side of his sixtieth birthday, was somebody you could make a bit of fun of. They would be sitting there doubled over
in laughter when they had their coffee break at the lab. At least he would soon be retiring!

In a rage, Blomberg sat down in front of his computer and pushed aside a heap of ring files. He had intended to sneak off early from the office but on his way out he had bumped into the head of
the crime squad, Superintendant Strömqvist. He had given him some extra tasks and even had the audacity to ask him to do overtime. That superintendent had also withdrawn his earlier promise to
Blomberg about being able to retire early, blaming the change on the recent complicated cases and heavy workload at the office.

‘We need every man we’ve got,’ he had said. ‘When the bank robbery has been solved we’ll look at your application again.’

Blomberg was thinking that he’d soon be a pensioner, but now he wasn’t even going to be allowed to work reduced hours. No, he was still stuck working full time – and overtime.
All their resources were to be concentrated on the Handelsbanken robbery. They seemed to be just treading water in the investigation, and even after questioning all their contacts they had no
leads. Blomberg had been asked to interview people working in shops that sold fireworks. Blomberg felt like a fool going around asking such questions. He remembered the conversation he had had in
one shop in Karlaplan. He had, admittedly, forgotten to show his warrant card, but, nevertheless . . .

‘Have you got any fireworks?’

‘Not at this time of the year. But we do have bags of seeds that you can hang in the trees for the birds . . .’

That was the stupid sort of conversation that his investigation resulted in, and, considering that millions of fireworks had been sold in Sweden for the New Year celebrations, the task felt
hopeless. There were no other leads except for a single footprint in the snow. That was really strange. A bank robber couldn’t be one-legged, could he? In addition to this, the police
hadn’t been able to cordon off the crime scene soon enough, so virtually every Stockholmer who had passed the bank had left footprints. He took a chocolate and tried to calm his nerves. The
greatest mystery was those two victims who had disappeared after the explosion. The witnesses had seen two wounded people who were carried away on stretchers and put into the ambulance, but none of
the A & E departments of the hospitals in the Stockholm area had admitted any such patients at that time. At least they had managed to secure some blood samples from the scene, and, if only the
lab stopped muddling up the test results, that ought to provide some clues.

At every crime there are always so many false alarms. Blomberg sighed again. He was getting nowhere, he needed help. He would ask his boss for reinforcement: he needed an experienced detective;
he had more important things to do. All those millions he had fished up from the account in Las Vegas must be used. He was not going to delay the meeting with Birgerson, the expert at Beylings
Legal Firm.

It had stopped raining and now a cold wind blew in from the water down in the docks. The containers were still wet and the Tarmac shone. Blomberg shivered and pulled up his
collar. It was always so cold in Sweden. Weather like this ought to be against the law – yes, it should be a criminal offence! Blomberg gave a start; he seemed to think of nothing but crime
nowadays.

‘This is where your goods end up. Nice, isn’t it?’

Lawyer Birgerson pointed at the former workshop down in the harbour. He had driven Blomberg to the old area where they used to look after island boats. Now it had been converted into a storage
area where you could rent space. Beylings had rented a large unit. Blomberg was reminded of the old Eriksberg shipyard in Göteborg with huge hanger-like premises and where large diesel engines
and boats had once been built. This was something similar. These halls were enormous.

‘Most of this will have been moved on within a month, and then you can rent this space,’ said Birgerson, gesturing with his hand towards the sailing boats on their stands, and a row
of lorries. ‘As soon as you’ve acquired your stuff, we can take over ownership on paper so that nothing can be traced to you. Then, when everything is quiet, you can sell.’

‘But more than two hundred million – that’ll be a lot of goods.’

‘It’s OK. We’ll buy a Beneteau Swift Trawler, a few motor sailing vessels, some veteran boats and yachts. That will add up to quite a lot. Then we can put in some bids for
Rolls-Royces, mobile homes and Porsches too. But all that takes up a lot of space. Why not invest in art and diamonds? We’ve got special storage units for that, with the right temperature and
humidity. And then there is property, of course, but there can always be problems with tenants, so we charge quite a large fee to administer that.’

Chief Inspector Blomberg leaned against the wall, pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his brow several times. It almost made him dizzy. Birgerson was talking about millions as if they were
popcorn; indeed, the lawyer seemed to have lost contact with reality. Perhaps that was what happened when you only thought about money. Money, money, money.

‘Apart from the luxury boats, could we perhaps buy some Bentleys and Porsches?’ Blomberg stuttered. ‘And then, of course, the big spring art auction has one or two nice
things.’

‘Quite right. Art is the way to go!’

‘But what happens if there’s a break-in or the whole warehouse burns down?’ Blomberg asked, thinking that a fire in this oily hall could destroy not only all the stuff stored
here, but also all his dreams of a comfortable retirement. Birgerson unlocked the doors to the heated units deep inside the warehouse, turned on the light and smiled.

‘A break-in? Do you mean one that has been arranged, or an ordinary one?’

Blomberg moistened his lips.

‘Err, an ordinary break-in. What if somebody comes and steals stuff?’

Birgerson nodded, and with a light touch of his finger on a control panel, the storage shelves and rows of paintings started to move on the grey-painted rails on the floor.

‘Fire and theft? We’re insured. We are Folksam’s best customer.’ He laughed. ‘Some people are busy with insurance fraud . . .’