The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly Read online

  Dedication

  To my readers in English, all over the world,

  thank you for your enduring support.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  THE LITTLE OLD LADY PUT THE BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE INTO THE fridge. After a bank robbery it is always nice to celebrate, but of course you have to ensure that the bubbly is properly chilled.

  Martha Andersson hummed a little to herself while she put out a tray, five tall champagne glasses and some light snacks on the kitchen table. Then she went into the bedroom to prepare herself for the coming night’s adventures. While she got dressed, she went through the plan in her head one last time. In exactly two hours, the League of Pensioners would strike again, and this would be their most advanced crime yet. She picked up the keys from the hall table and went out into the dark.

  1

  WHEN THE GARBAGE TRUCK STOPPED OUTSIDE THE BANK, nobody reacted. Not even when the suction tube mouthpiece was maneuvered out and connected to the building’s waste-disposal system. It was 4:30 in the morning and none of the people out on the streets of Stockholm at that time of day were interested in garbage. With the exception of the League of Pensioners. A flash of lightning lit up the sky and the five pensioners looked contentedly at one another. Thunder was just what they were waiting for.

  “Right you are!” said Martha and she glanced up at the large bank palace. “Banks don’t like it when you withdraw money. But now this will really be an eye-opener for them!”

  She felt the buttons on the control panel for the pneumatic collector and looked out through the windscreen. The garbage truck could manage ten tons. And what was in the bank vault would easily fit. Now all they had to do was suck it all into the tank.

  “OK, here are your face masks,” said Martha, handing out a bearded Pavarotti to Brains, a grinning Elton John to Rake and a clean-shaven Brad Pitt mask to Christina’s son Anders. “Out you get, and good luck!”

  “What about me?” Anna-Greta objected, stretching out for the smiling Margaret Thatcher latex mask.

  “Oh yes, of course,” mumbled Martha and she handed her the mask.

  The presumptive criminals put on their masks, got out of the truck and took up position on the street, while Martha and Christina remained sitting inside. This was it!

  Down on the pavement, Brains contentedly patted the pipe leading to the waste-disposal system, adjusted his work overalls with the logo WE’LL CLEAN YOU OUT across his chest and walked toward the entrance. The considerably younger Anders from the same firm walked after him with two wheeled trash cans, and the others waited a while before they too followed. Rake had his bandanna neatly tied around his neck, and his colleague Anna-Greta, wearing a wide-rimmed felt hat, supported herself with her walking stick, for the sake of appearances. (It was, for that matter, still a little bent from when she had taken it with her to the sauna steam room at the Grand Hotel. But it was her favorite walking stick.) The friends looked up at the sky: heavy dark clouds, flashes of lightning and the first few drops of rain. It looked most promising.

  A gray rain became all the more noticeable and the buildings turned into dark shapes in the gloomy light. You could hardly see the figures moving on the street, let alone identify them. That was just what they wanted. Brains punched in the door code and then held open the door for the others in a gentlemanly fashion.

  “Don’t forget to keep quiet. A few floors up, there are people asleep in their beds,” he admonished them.

  “Absolutely, we won’t make a sound!” said Anna-Greta with her bellowing voice. As usual, she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid.

  The League of Pensioners quickly slipped in through the door, while Anders, who was wheeling the specially manufactured carts in reinforced, extremely lightweight styrofoam, followed behind them. Martha had insisted on lightweight trash cans because the rest of the equipment—the folding ladders, tools and other paraphernalia—was rather heavy. If you were a crook in your eighties, you had to take care not to strain yourself.

  They didn’t care about the bank premises on the ground floor, but took the lift to the bank’s staff entrance up on the first floor. The gang had studied a plan of the building and knew that if you were going to get into the vault the usual way, you would have to force doors that were two feet thick. Even the cotter pins were thicker than the biggest telephone poles. So it was better to concentrate on the floor above which was of pinewood and insulated with plasterboard and chipboard.

  “That sort of jerry-built construction can be broken up by sneezing!” Martha had said when they planned the coup. “Chipboard and plasterboard, goodness me, that’s junk material!”

  As part of their preparations, she had been inside the bank and discussed some investments, and on those occasions she had made a point of complementing the bank officer for the elegant flooring. And then, of course, she had asked how it was constructed and where could she get a similar floor because she wanted one just as fancy for her own apartment. Indeed, as with every crime, good planning was of the essence.

  Brains felt a drop of sweat on his chin. The work overalls were too warm and wearing a Pavarotti latex mask was admittedly a good way of fooling the police, but it was stickier than the worst toffee. Rake’s Elton John disguise didn’t seem nearly as uncomfortable, and Anna-Greta actually looked perfectly happy as Margaret Thatcher. Even though a former prime minister would hardly have gone around in work clothes with the logo WE’LL CLEAN YOU OUT written on them.

  “Here it is!”

  Brains looked around him, took a deep breath and quickly picked the lock to the staff entrance. Then he carefully opened the door, advanced a few quick steps to the alarm panel
and short-circuited it. The others followed after him, and once inside the door they turned on their little diode lamps and let the beams sweep over the room. Dark brick walls, newly laid floor, some bookcases, chairs and a meeting table in the middle. It looked just like any other work place does—but this one was right on top of a bank vault with at least ten million kronor in it.

  Brains pulled one of the trash cans toward him and fished out a compass saw, a drill, a hammer and some little blue and pink pigs he had got from Swedbank. They were piggy banks which preferably should not be shaken because, on this occasion, they were filled with explosives and not with coins. Brains, with his many years’ experience as an engineer and inventor, had thought that twelve-inch firework bombs with black powder ought to make the work a bit easier and so, without Martha knowing about it, he had added some extra. In particular, the pink piggy bank had a very potent charge.

  “And now the ladders,” said Brains, scratching himself under the Pavarotti beard. Anders lifted them out of bin number two, fumbled a bit in the semi-dark, but finally managed to put the pieces together, after which Brains took a deep breath and said:

  “Right, my friends, now all we have to do is make some holes in the floor.”

  The drill and compass saw were handed out and Brains, Rake and Anders set to work. Incidentally, Anders had chosen a Brad Pitt mask because he didn’t want to look as old as the others, and now he regretted it. The mask was so tight that he could hardly breathe.

  In the pale blue beam of the diodes, the men succeeded in drilling several holes and then enlarging them, with the compass saw, after which it was time for the piggy banks. Brains was perspiring so much that for a brief moment he worried that he would faint from dehydration, because he hadn’t brought a water bottle with him. Dehydration in a bank? Who could have thought of that?

  MARTHA LOOKED UP AT THE GABLE BUILDING THAT HER DISGUISED friends had entered. Only she and Christina were left in the truck. Brains was going to give a signal when they had reached the vault and broken open a hole in the wall containing the shaft to the pneumatic trash collection system. So Martha and Christina had to be ready to start up the suction pump, and then it was full speed ahead . . . Martha tried to remember the blueprint of the building. It would take Brains and the others quite a while to make a hole in the floor and then perhaps another half-hour to break through the wall between the vault and the refuse shaft. If they didn’t come across any unexpected difficulties, that is. They had chosen one of Stockholm’s very biggest banks with the most cash. Because nowadays they had to think in terms of giant robberies, if they were to raise the necessary money for their charity work. And there ought to be lots of money in this bank vault. In the computer files at the central archive they hadn’t been able to access the drawings of the floors above the bank office since they had been removed for reasons of security. But then Martha had shed lots of tears and, sobbing, told them about her important research work on historic buildings. She was writing a book about this palace-like building, and this was her life’s work. The head of the archive gave in and she was given access to some old microfilms of the building.

  She giggled to herself and ran her fingers over the joystick. What she now didn’t know about the storerooms, the stairwell, the refuse shafts and the electrical wiring wasn’t worth knowing. She even knew how thick the walls and floor were . . . She glanced up at the bank again. Why on earth was it taking such a long time? Nothing could have gone wrong . . . could it?

  “JUST LOOK AT THAT! FIFTY CENTIMETRES THICK, JUST LIKE MARTHA said.” Rake nodded toward the drilled holes in the floor.

  Brains put the compass saw to one side. “OK, give me the piggy banks!”

  “Here are our savings,” said Anna-Greta and she handed them over.

  “Good thing we didn’t make a hole in the garbage chute first. Then there would have been such a stench here,” said Rake.

  Brains pushed the piggy banks into the holes and withdrew.

  “Quiet. Put your earplugs in and take cover!” he called out, and he signalled to the others to follow him into the bank director’s room a bit further away. He didn’t have a fuse and a firing device, but was going to set everything off electronically.

  “Ear plugs?! Have you ever tried putting ear plugs in a latex Elton John mask?” Rake muttered.

  “Another miss,” mumbled Brains, and he shut his eyes and pressed the button.

  MARTHA THREW AN ANXIOUS GLANCE AT THE WINDOWS ONE floor above the bank. Sometimes she could discern a weak strip of light, that was all. Something must have gone wrong.

  “Christina, wait here. I’ll be back soon,” she said as she slid down from the seat.

  “No, stop!” protested her friend, who was wearing male work clothes and a peaked cap pulled down over her brow. “I can’t work the suction pump on my own.”

  “But I’ll be back in a jiffy, I’ll just make sure everything is in order.” Martha stroked her calmingly on the back of her hand. “I need you here for the time being.”

  Christina gave her an anxious look, and Martha patted her on her cheek too for good measure. She hoped she would remain calm. Her friend was always worrying unnecessarily.

  “Back soon,” Martha told her again, and she opened the door and jumped out into the street. She looked around her, couldn’t see anybody, walked up to the entrance and punched in the code. Then she went up the stairs and stopped in front of the staff entrance. There was silence. You couldn’t even hear Anna-Greta’s voice from inside. Martha felt the door handle, pressed it down and went in. Oh my God, what is Pavarotti doing here? Isn’t he dead? went through her mind before she remembered that it was Brains’s latex mask.

  “I didn’t dare use too much powder. It only went ‘plutt,’” Brains mumbled. “You said the charge shouldn’t be more powerful than a firework,” he added in excuse and pointed at the floor where you could see that there were burns around the edges of a large hole.

  “I meant a large firework,” said Martha.

  “OK, then,” retorted Brains, and he fetched some more piggy banks from the bin. “Now you’ll see something. Take cover!”

  If the Pavarotti mask hadn’t been so stiff, then you would have been able to see Brains smile, but the rubber had the same latex smile as before and nobody noticed Brains’s satisfied grin. The seniors withdrew and crouched down behind heavy oak tables and partitions. A few seconds passed, and then there was a huge bang.

  “Bloody hell!” coughed a dust-covered Elton John in a Gothenburg accent when mortar, planks, floor tiles and plaster collapsed in a cloud of dust.

  “Nice one!” could be heard from Anders in his Brad Pitt mask, as he shook some mortar out of his rubber hair and tried to smother a sneeze.

  “Oh yes, ho, ho, ho. That did the job!” Anna-Greta neighed so loudly that her Margaret Thatcher mask was about to fall off.

  Martha didn’t say anything. Her heart was thumping away so hard that she could hardly breathe. Brains had promised that he wouldn’t use too powerful a charge, but this must have been heard throughout the building.

  “We must hurry,” she managed to say, and she crept up to the edge of the hole. The force of the explosion had been merciless and had ripped open the floor so that now you could see right down into the vault below. And not only that. The security boxes had been damaged too, and the doors were hanging on loose hinges. Paper, jewelry, and even bars of gold were scattered among the remains of the plaster and mortar in the vault.

  “Bring the ladders,” Brains urged, waving to Anders to come to him. Christina’s son was their private home help and he usually carried out the heaviest tasks when the League of Pensioners struck. Now he put the ladders into place so that the gang could descend into the bank vault. They climbed down and looked about them. Everything was OK, except one vital feature. The brick wall in front of the garbage chute was still there.

  “Then I’ll detonate another charge,” suggested Brains.

  “No, wait!” said Martha,
going up to the wall and feeling with her thumb along the wallpaper. “Just as I thought. The building was renovated in the 1960s and then the builders didn’t know anything. As if it wasn’t enough that roofs, floors and walls became moldy. Just look at this!” She peeled away a bit of the wallpaper and some plaster fell out. “The joints are dissolving. They look all right at first sight, but inside they are like sugar. In those days they often mixed cement in brackish water. So we won’t be needing any dynamite here. It—”

  “You can hold your lecture until later. Just now we’re robbing a bank,” muttered Rake.

  “Yes, but so that you’ll understand,” insisted Martha, “you only need to hack away at the joints and lift the bricks out, and then we’ll reach the garbage chute directly. Back to work now. I must return to the truck.” And with those words she hurried up the ladder, stepped into the bank director’s room and snuck out through the entrance.

  DOWN IN THE BANK VAULT, THE REST OF THE GANG KEPT AT IT. With the pointed geological hammer Anna-Greta hacked away at the mortar joints while humming a little tune to herself, a tune that the stone masons in Bohuslän on the west coast used to sing in bygone days. Although a former bank officer herself, she was now remarkably laid back. The time since they had left the old people’s home had undeniably done her good.

  “I have a little more powder in reserve,” Brains called out, soaked in sweat under the Pavarotti mask and feeling around deep in the bin. Then, in triumph, he held up another two piggy banks, light-blue this time. “You won’t believe what a boost this will be!”

  WHEN MARTHA CAME OUT OF THE ENTRANCE, THE STREET SEEMED to be just as quiet and deserted as earlier. A solitary nocturnal pedestrian came walking around the corner and, further away, she glimpsed a car. She screwed her eyes up a little and took a step back. Dearie me, a police car! It was going down Fleminggatan. It didn’t stop, however, but turned in to Saint Eriksgatan and disappeared. Martha took a deep breath and then slowly exhaled. They had better look snappy before anyone suspected anything, she thought. The garbage truck might not have passed its inspection, or there might be some new legal requirement that the police had to check.