The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again! (30 page)

‘Indeed,’ Anna-Greta agreed with a loud voice. ‘We’re only going to borrow the gold and it must be in just as good a condition when we give it back.’

The others nodded in solemn unity. Everyone was pleased that finally they would be getting back into action. The preparations had taken longer than intended and the making of the pictorial
stones had been much stickier and more difficult than they had thought it would be. In the end, Brains and Rake had managed to do the casting, and then the girls had taken over with the finishing
flourishes. Thanks to Anna-Greta’s collection of history books, and under the guidance of Christina, they had been able to copy the pictorial stones exactly. The end products looked so
natural with the boats and the figures, that Rake had become really interested in history. However, some details did differ from the genuine articles. On the back there was a door so that you could
go inside the pictorial stone but since the shell was of Styrofoam and the PVC plastic had been much heavier than they had imagined, you couldn’t hang the stones directly on your shoulders.
So Anders had helped Brains to put together a supportive wooden frame on wheels. In addition, the stones had been fitted with numbered hooks so that you could hang up the gold treasures inside.
Then the five friends, with Gunnar’s assistance, rented a trailer, checked out where all the alarms were placed, and studied staff routines at the Historical Museum. Now the only thing left
to do, was to actually carry out the
Great Robbery
.

‘Yes, my dear friends. Sleep well tonight. Tomorrow evening is the big event.’

Martha raised her glass and they started singing the Swedish national song – after all, they were just about to lay their hands on Sweden’s national heritage.

All morning they had been adding the final touches to the pictorial stones before they fastened them securely on the trailer. Now the League of Pensioner’s old minibus
trundled along in the Stockholm traffic with Anders at the wheel. He and Emma were on their way to the Historical Museum, as instructed by their mother. He slowed down at Narvavagen and turned left
towards the museum. His right hand brushed his unshaven cheeks.

‘Like I said, there’s no rest and no peace when mother gets started, dear me, no,’ Anders sighed.

Emma nodded, tired too.

‘Now Mum and the others are going to commit a crime again, what can we do about it?’

‘Sis, there isn’t much we can do, but look at it like this. Mum has her friends and is in good spirits. She is so perky that she can even babysit for you sometimes. She doesn’t
complain about aches and pains and how lonely she is, but instead giggles when she talks about robbery coups and the like.’

‘Yes, of course, you’re right about that.’

‘Since they would refuse to live in any type of retirement home, we’ve simply got to help them as best we can.’

‘Yes, sure, but they’ve only recently committed a crime, so I thought we’d be able to take things easy for a while,’ Emma sighed. ‘Malin isn’t sleeping well
at nights so I’m actually beginning to get a little tired.’

After the Handelsbanken robbery, both Emma and Anders had intended living their usual and safe middle-class life, but now, once again, they had been pulled out of that calm existence. Not to
help a tired, aging mother but to assist her in crime.

‘We can hardly protest. We are already deeply involved in their activities. If Mum gets caught, then we’ll go down with them.’ Anders scratched his chin.

Emma pulled out some chewing gum and started to chew frantically. How long was the prison sentence for assisting in a robbery? Or stealing antiquities for that matter?

‘We are in this up to our necks; we’ve simply got to keep working. I think they could take things a bit easier. They are wearing us out.’

‘Don’t let Martha hear you saying that. Then she’ll force you to start in the gym too!’

Emma laughed, the typical resigned laugh of an exhausted mother who hasn’t slept properly for several nights. ‘Right, here we are. Drive into the yard and stop by the
steps.’

She and Anders were wearing stained restorers’ working overalls and had timed their visit for when people were having their lunch break. At that time there were always a lot of visitors
and nobody would bother about them. They parked the minibus, went round to the trailer and lifted off one of the pictorial stones. Thankfully, you couldn’t see the wheels because they were
retracted, otherwise they would have been hard to explain.

When the two of them passed the entry hall they cheerfully greeted the staff and continued towards the Gold Room. They put the first pictorial stone down just next to where the stairs started
and then went to fetch the other two. Finally they put two notices next to the grand pictorial stones, museum notices which even had some text in English. Brains, who was very good at languages,
had wanted to have Italian, Spanish, Russian and Croatian too, but the others had protested. The notices must look just like all the others in the museum. When Anders and Emma were finished, they
took a step back. The pictorial stones with their images of ships, gods and legends really did look just like the real thing. Christina had even managed to portray Oden’s eight-legged horse
Sleipner.

‘To think that Mum can forge things too!’ said Anders, sounding rather proud.

‘Say she can copy artefacts, not forge them, somebody might hear us,’ Emma whispered. ‘We’d best be moving!’

Emma and Anders left the museum as quickly as possible so that few people would notice their presence.

In the evening, the League of Pensioners arrived with a large group of people interested in history to listen to the museum’s evening lecture about the Vikings. A sprightly curator, who
had recently defended his doctoral thesis which had come to the conclusion that the Vikings had never existed, was talking. All the studies must be done again, he claimed, and Martha quickly stood
up to protest, but just as quickly sat down again. This particular evening it was best to keep a low profile. A very low profile.

Later, when the guards had shooed out the last of the visitors after the lecture, Martha, Christina and Anna-Greta stayed on in the Ladies room.

‘Couldn’t we have found a nicer place to hide ourselves?’ Anna-Greta whispered where she stood, squeezed inside one of the cubicles.

‘There are no CCTV cameras in here, so get your cleaners’ uniforms on,’ Martha reminded them.

‘Cleaners’ uniforms on,’ Christina and Anna-Greta repeated in unison and soon you could hear strange sounds from the cubicles accompanied by sighs and groans while the ladies
changed. Then they were quiet again.

‘Ready?’ Martha asked.

An affirmative murmur was heard and Martha’s mobile started to vibrate at the same time. This was the agreed signal. Martha pressed the key to see Rake’s text message. She shook her
head. Rake had evidently tried to text her with the autocorrect programme turned on and all she could see was a row of a strange combination of letters.

‘Oh dear me, what a mess,’ said Martha turning pale. Why had Rake needed to show how modern he was just now? Did that mean that the coast was clear? Or that it wasn’t? She must
make a quick decision.

‘Rake has sent a coded message from his Nokia,’ she announced. ‘It’s time to go now.’ And with that the three ladies left their temporary residence and set off
towards the entrance hall.

Outside the museum, Anders had driven up with the Volkswagen minibus, now transformed into a van with the name SENIOR CLEANERS on the side. Brains and Rake got out of the van, opened the back
doors and took out two cleaning trolleys. Then they closed the doors, adjusted their work overalls and made sure they had their mops, cleaning rags and brushes with them. And Martha’s
handbag. She had insisted that it could come in useful should something unforeseen happen, and must be put next to the lift. After looking around in all directions, they approached the disability
lift on the street level, put Martha’s handbag in, pushed in their cleaning trolleys, and then went in too. They pressed the button for the entrance hall and, while the lift worked its way
up, they prepared themselves mentally. The lift doors opened and they went straight out. Right into the arms of two guards.

‘We’re turning the alarm on now,’ said an officious type in his fifties.

‘No, Securitas are going to service the alarm system today. That’s why we’re doing the cleaning now,’ Rake replied and waved his mop.

‘I haven’t heard anything about that. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.’

‘No, we’re here now. Look for yourselves!’ Rake spouted on and fished out a piece of paper from his overalls, a document full of official stamps. Christina had been on top form
and there was hardly an empty space on the whole sheet. ‘And anyway,’ Rake added, ‘at Senior Cleaners we always do the cleaning in the evening. You wanted us to be invisible,
since you don’t like making a show of using cheap labour.’

‘Hmm,’ said the guard. ‘Just a moment, I’ll have a word with my colleague.’ He went off, but when he came back he arrogantly gestured towards the exit.

‘Sorry. You’ll have to come another time. I can’t take responsibility for this.’

‘You don’t need to,’ Rake replied with a glance at Brains. His friend didn’t look happy. At this point he would have to do something he didn’t like and which they
had planned as an emergency measure if something went wrong. But now the time had come. Rake steered his trolley to one side and when the guard turned his back, Brains pushed a wet cleaning rag
against his face. Two quick breaths of the ether and the guard sank to the floor. Rake hurried to fetch his colleague.

‘Your mate just collapsed.’

The younger colleague saw his comrade lying lifeless on the floor, paled and rushed up to him. When he bent over, Brains was ready again.

‘Welcome to the party,’ he said and pressed the rag in the man’s face.

‘Wha . . . wa . . .’ the guard blurted out before he, too, collapsed in a heap on the floor. Then Rake got out his mobile to send a new text, but before he could send it off, Martha,
Christina and Anna-Greta turned up. They nodded discreetly to their friends and walked determinedly towards the Gold Room. At the top of the stairs they went up to their pictorial stones, looked
around, opened the back doors and stepped inside – all except Anna-Greta, who had left her spectacles at home and walked right into the real pictorial stone from Gotland.

‘Oh my goodness!’ she mumbled, somewhat groggy, and quickly switched to the stone next to it, the one in PVC plastic.

‘We ought to have put the pictorial stones a bit closer to the disability lift,’ Martha mumbled in a low voice from inside the cramped space. The plastic felt rough against her
neck.

‘A good job we’ve got some breathing holes,’ Christina answered in a stressed voice from inside her stone, and she inhaled through the opening in an old Viking sail. ‘I
hope the carbon dioxide level doesn’t get too high.’

‘When the police see the pictorial stones move they’ll think there is something wrong with the CCTV cameras,’ Anna-Greta guffawed and for the first time in the history of the
museum a pictorial stone could be heard snorting.

When they had each closed the door on the back of their pictorial stone and lowered the wheels, the three ladies rolled slowly and carefully towards the lift for the disabled. They tried to do
it with jerky movements like in an old silent film to make it look as if the camera was wonky, so they couldn’t move very fast and Brains and Rake, with their Senior Cleaner caps, had soon
caught up with them.

‘You can imagine how confounded the police are going to be,’ said Rake with a broad grin when he’d managed to squeeze his way into the lift with his cleaning trolley.
‘Ancient runic stones pursued by two cleaning trolleys . . .’

‘They’re called pictorial stones, not runic stones,’ Anna-Greta corrected him with her voice echoing inside the stone copy.

‘Shush! Keep your wits about you!’ said Christina in a hollow, half-dampened voice. ‘This crime requires concentration!’

Her voice sounded so funny from inside the stone that they all simply had to laugh and it took a good while before they had pulled themselves together to such a degree that Brains could press
the ‘Down’ button in the lift.

When they reached the basement, Martha’s voice could be heard: ‘Have you got everything with you?’

‘Yes, even the smoke-grenades,’ said Rake holding up one of the bottles of cleaning fluid with its new contents.

‘Excellent, excellent,’ could be heard from inside the stones, as they navigated on their wooden wheels towards the Wishing Well in the Gold Room.

‘Are you ready?’ Rake said, with the bottle of cleaning fluid in his hand.

Various sounds emanated from inside the stones and Rake interpreted them as a yes. The next moment, a smoke grenade was on its way down into the Wishing Well.

As soon as the smoke started to smart in their eyes, Brains regretted having taken along the smoke grenades. It would probably have been better with carbon dioxide snow, or why
hadn’t they just drilled a few holes in one of the fire extinguishers? Now it was hard to see and it would be tricky to work fast. But of course it was too late to have second thoughts now.
They only had a few minutes.

Rake and Brains went off behind the display cases. Once there, Brains pulled out his new invention. Christina had pointed out that villains often gave themselves away by using the same modus
operandi for every crime. So it was a question of doing something new and Brains had done his best in that respect. In the increasingly dense smog, the two men steered their cleaning trolleys in
behind the display cases and set to work. Rake pulled out his battery-powered drill from the shaft of his sweeping brush, and started to systematically drill holes in the edge of the cases. Then
Brains took over with his specially prepared mop. With a slight squeeze of his hand, the compass saw with its laser blade shot out and, to the accompaniment of a squeaking racket, he sawed up a
large opening on the back of the cases. Then along came Martha, Anna-Greta and Christina, inside their pictorial stones. The magnificent ancient monuments slowly rolled along, turned their backs to
the display case, and then doors were opened and arms with flabby flesh were exposed. There was very little time, and Martha and her friends didn’t waste it. With gloved hands they grabbed
the gold and put it inside the black rubbish bags with the same number as the various display cases. Then they hung up the bags on the numbered hooks inside the stones. Thanks to the fact that the
ladies had practised this manoeuvre several times in the workshop at home, it all went very smoothly, but perhaps that also made them a little blase. They were by no means as attentive as they
ought to have been, and they didn’t notice the cracks in the PVC plastic. With each bag of gold the strain on the plastic became all the greater, and it started making cracking sounds.
However, because the laser saw made such a dreadful racket, none of them heard the mysterious cracking in the plastic. They could hardly hear what they were singing.