The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again!

by Ingelman-Sundberg, Catharina

  ‘A sweet, boys?’

  Tompa and Jörgen shook their heads and quickly exchanged looks. All sorts of thoughts were racing through Martha’s mind. What if Brains was wrong, if he was just boasting like men do? Perhaps the remote didn’t work at all. Then at last she heard ‘John’, the robot vacuum cleaner, start up in the library, rattle across the wooden floor, and collide into the sofa with a bump.

  ‘What? What was that?’ Tompa said and quickly got up.

  ‘Empty the dust bag, empty the dust bag,’ John announced in his English robot voice, slightly distorted after all the collisions with the furniture.

  ‘What?’ Jörgen exclaimed and looked worried.

  ‘Such a lot of dust here, such a lot of dust here!’ John went on in his Oxford English accent.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Tompa said.

  ‘Oh, that’s only my darling John,’ Martha answered. ‘We’re such good friends.’

  ‘But you said you were on your own.’ Tompa looked nervously around.

  ‘On my own? I just forgot to say he was here.’ Martha gave them a wink and tried to look innocent. ‘Well, you see, you know what it’s like, you have to make use of your opportunities. But, please, don’t tell! Men are always so jealous.’

  ‘So you’ve got—’ Tompa started to say, but he was immediately cut off by the voice from the library.

  ‘There’s a mess here, it must be cleaned. There’s a mess here, it must be cleaned. Have you had an orgy?’ John asked in his robot voice now from the other room – the voice sounded more distant now. Why on earth had Brains reprogrammed the vacuum cleaner so that it said a whole lot of unsuitable things?

  ‘Have you had an orgy? Empty the dust bag!’ could be heard from the library.

  ‘Shut up!’ Jörgen exclaimed – he couldn’t speak English and had no idea what John was saying. He got up and strode across towards the door to silence him.

  ‘Stop!’ Martha shouted. ‘John is ill. He’s got German measles. You’ll catch it!’

  ‘Oh!’ Jörgen stopped in his tracks.

  ‘Clean the brushes, clean the brushes,’ came the muted voice. The battery was running out. Martha realized the danger.

  ‘Please, the others will be back soon. John and I can’t meet often.’ She nodded towards the library. ‘I must go to him.’

  ‘All right, all right, we’ll be off, but don’t forget that we want to buy or lease your land. We’ll be back.’

  The bikers adjusted their leather vests and hurried on their way. When they had gone, Martha opened her bag and turned John off with the remote. Then she went out onto the veranda and sank down in the cane chair. Her heart was thumping and she was all sweaty. She stared out across the water and tried to calm down, but she was shaking all over. When the others came back, she couldn’t even manage to get up from the chair; she remained sitting there and it took quite a while before her friends got a word out of her. Even then she didn’t say very much. She didn’t want to frighten them too.

  The next day, when Christina threw a glance at the thermometer outside the window, she saw Tompa walking around in the garden.

  ‘Listen everybody, the Bandangels are snooping round here,’ Christina said and she waved Rake and the others across to the window. Tompa had a measuring tape, he had fastened one end in a branch and was now walking along the fence measuring the length of it. When he reached the bushes by the water, he turned straight in towards the lilac arbour.

  ‘What in heaven’s name is he up to?’ Rake asked.

  ‘They’re cooking up something,’ Martha replied, as she reluctantly realized that she must tell them about her unpleasant meeting with Jörgen and Tompa. ‘Bandangels want to lease our land.’

  ‘But they can’t do that, can they?’ Christina moaned.

  ‘I said that we wouldn’t go along with that.’

  ‘The worst thing with biker gangs is that they have their own laws,’ Rake said. ‘They don’t care very much about what we say.’

  ‘But they’ve got fancy motorbikes,’ Brains tried to calm things over.

  ‘We’ll have to keep an eye on them. I don’t think we can continue to keep our stuff in the cellar. They’ve already been there snooping, so we can’t take the risk. We’ll have to get some new storage space.’

  ‘Ah, you want us to go out working again,’ Rake sighed.

  ‘Take it easy. Brains and I can manage this on our own, can’t we?’ said Martha and she held out her hand. Brains took it and squeezed so hard that Martha felt such a warm sensation spread through her body that suddenly she was lost for words.

  ‘Yes, quite right, Martha, we’ll manage this. We’ll certainly find some good storage facilities on the Internet,’ Brains added, actually feeling rather proud that he had at last started to understand how the Internet worked.

  ‘Why not try Stockholm Docks?’ Christina suggested. ‘They have lots of goods storage there. Our stuff will just vanish in the mass.’

  Everyone thought Christina’s idea was good, and a little later they went onto Google Maps and zoomed in on the dock warehouses. They studied the fencing, the guard boxes and the gates, and settled on the older part of the harbour where they used to repair boats in bygone days.

  ‘That would do us nicely, let’s drive there and have a look,’ said Martha, getting up. ‘We’d best go straight away before the rush-hour traffic starts.’

  Martha and Brains drove in towards the city, turned off towards the free port area and finally reached a high fence with a guard box and an entry with a lowered barrier.

  ‘I wonder that they’ll say when they see a minibus with a wheelchair ramp on the back?’ Martha said when they drove up to the barrier.

  ‘I don’t think the guard over there would have reacted, even if we’d come in an army tank with caterpillar tracks,’ said Brains, nodding towards the guard box. Inside sat a young man, who must have been about twenty-five years old, with a mobile phone pressed against one ear, rocking on his chair. He hadn’t even noticed that they had driven up. It wasn’t until Martha and Brains knocked on the window a few times that he turned towards them, yawned widely and reluctantly put his mobile down.

  ‘Err?’ he said. It was presumably a question.

  ‘We want to rent a storage space,’ said Martha. ‘The best you have. It must have an alarm and be guarded but it doesn’t have to be too big.’

  The man with the mobile thumbed through some papers.

  ‘Everything is full. All that we have is a small storage unit right at the far end of the old ship-building hall.’

  ‘Right, we’ll drive there.’

  The security guard opened the barrier and let Martha and Brains pass. Then he closed it again, picked up the mobile phone and, with his iPhone pressed against his ear, walked in front of the minibus in the direction of the old ship-building area. When they reached a red-brick building with a large wide door facing the water, he stopped, dug into his pocket and pulled out a plastic card. He fed that into a little thingamajig next to the door, keyed in some numbers and turned the alarm off. Then he opened the door with the same card. Martha and Brains got out of the bus and followed him into the warehouse. They entered a large storage area which smelt of garage, sea and diesel oil. The concrete floor looked as if it had been cast just a few years earlier, but the high red-brick walls must be about a hundred years old. All around were shiny luxury yachts, sports cars and motorbikes of the latest model, and there were storage shelves further inside as well. When Brains caught sight of a Harley-Davidson, he got out his mobile to take a photo.

  ‘No, you can’t take pictures in here!’ The security guard waved disapprovingly with his hand.

  ‘Why not?’ said Martha.

  ‘Well, there are things here that people might not want everyone to see.’

  The security guard grinned and continued towards the door right at the end. Martha’s curiosity had been aroused; she discreetly pulled out her own mobile and dropped back a bit behind the men before taking pi
ctures of everything that looked exciting. Brains realized what she was doing, broke into a wide smile and gave her a wink. When they reached the door, the man pulled out his plastic card again and, after a click, he opened the door and showed them inside the final storage area.

  ‘This is a bit too small for the big players unless, of course, they’ve got expensive art,’ he said and laughed. ‘The city needs larger units.’

  ‘The city?’ Martha wasn’t sure what he meant.

  ‘Yes, the city council. Everybody knows that. They are selling everything nowadays and the people who are involved don’t want to know how much money they earn from that.’

  Martha restrained herself, angled her head to one side and played stupid.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand at all.’

  The security guard hesitated, closed his phone and put it into his pocket. Then he pulled it out again and started to key in a number. Martha stopped him.

  ‘Ah, I see, you don’t really know anything, you’re just pretending, right?’ Martha cajoled. To question and challenge men was not a bad idea. Martha had often found in the past that they just wanted to show how much they knew.

  ‘I know how this works. This is just a part-time job for me, a bit of extra money, otherwise I’m a student at Handels.’

  ‘Handels? You mean the School of Economics?’

  ‘Yeah, right. And there you get to hear one thing and another. About how they’re selling council property such as retirement homes, day nurseries and schools. There’s lots of money involved in that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, and then there’s the home-care services and all the council-owned housing too.’

  ‘What is that about?’

  ‘It’s worth a lot of money. So when they sold it off, lots of people got very rich.’

  ‘How? What do you mean?’

  ‘Smart city business types got to know the people responsible and said that they’d give a bonus and a percentage of the future profits if they could buy certain things.’

  ‘But you can’t do that. That’s bribery.’

  Now the security guard smiled widely and patted Martha condescendingly on her shoulder. ‘Business is business. At Handels we use our brains!’ The security guard pointed at his forehead. ‘This is what we use when we do business. I know somebody who bought a nursery school building for a hundred and fifty thousand kronor. The council official who handled the sale got twenty thousand for his trouble. But the man who bought it then went and sold it again for many a million just a few years later. A good business transaction, don’t you think?’

  ‘Goodness, to think that you boys at Handels know all about things like that,’ said Martha with false admiration in her voice.

  ‘The profits end up in the West Indies, so you don’t have to pay tax. It’s as easy as pie for the big players in the branch – but the people who get the bribes have got a problem. They can’t have all that money visible in a bank account.’

  ‘Oh, I see, so they buy a luxury yacht or a Porsche?’ said Martha.

  ‘You’ve got it. But it’s a boat or a car that, on paper, is owned by somebody else – for example, a firm of lawyers.’

  ‘And then, of course, that firm of lawyers needs some space where they can store the goods,’ Martha supplemented.

  The security guard nodded.

  ‘Pretty smart, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m beginning to understand,’ said Brains. ‘So they store the stuff here for a while until they can sell it without arousing attention?’

  ‘Yes. Everyone is happy and satisfied and makes a profit.’

  ‘Except, of course, us ordinary taxpayers,’ Martha pointed out. ‘The things that we have paid for with our taxes are sold off cheap and then somebody makes a profit from that. Oh, that’s so immoral!’

  ‘Ah, everybody cheats and, as long as I get my wage, I don’t care. Anyway, what are you going to store here?’

  Stolen goods, Martha came close to saying, but managed to restrain herself at the last moment.

  ‘Oh, just a few knick-knacks,’ she said and blushed.

  ‘Knick-knacks?’

  ‘We’ve had a break-in and we want to store our stuff somewhere safe,’ she said.

  ‘No problem. There are alarms here everywhere and the whole place is guarded,’ assured the security guard.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Martha and Brains in unison. Then they trooped back towards the guard box at the entrance. As usual, Martha didn’t use her real name or personal identity number but instead used the fake coordination number and her new identity. When they had paid the deposit, received keys and their codes, Martha couldn’t restrain herself any longer.

  ‘But if a firm of lawyers owns all the stuff in there, how can you know who actually is the real owner?’

  ‘Of course there are names. You’ll have to hack into some computer or other, madam.’ The security guard grinned and patted her again on the shoulder.

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s exactly what we’ll have to do,’ Martha mumbled, while at the same time realizing that he had said too much. So there were names to look for. Strange how much somebody could reveal when they were talking to old people. It was as if they thought that the elderly had stopped thinking. For youths and politicians the elderly just didn’t seem to count. Not at all.

  On their way home in the minibus, Martha and Brains couldn’t help thinking about what they had just heard, because they had sufficient experience to realize that some very fishy things were going on in those storage areas.

  ‘Strange that we could walk through a storage unit that was rented by somebody else,’ Brains said, sharing his thoughts with the group.

  ‘But perhaps it was the only space not already rented out,’ Martha suggested.

  ‘Or perhaps that security guard rented it out to us on the side. I think he needed some extra money for his studies and he thought that we weren’t a risk, so they could rent the space inside.’ It was the same attitude that they encountered again and again. People regarded you as completely incompetent just because you were older.

  ‘Exactly, you are right. We never even got a copy of the contract. But, in fact, that’s rather a good thing. If he doesn’t do as we say, we can threaten to reveal his shady deals.’

  ‘Goodness, Martha, what an idea! Although that wasn’t a kind thought,’ teased Brains as he leaned forward and gave her a little kiss on the mouth. Martha suddenly became silent and let herself be filled with a completely different feeling; a really nice one.

  36

  Feeling slightly exhilarated, with her hair a bit dishevelled and her cheeks rosy, Martha was on her way to Riddarholmen in the Old Town with Brains. The robbery in the Gold Room must be prepared for thoroughly and they must go through their plan. A completely crazy plan, which required them to make a few things. They drove slowly along the quayside and stopped at a little doorway that faced the water.

  ‘It must be here.’

  Brains adjusted his spectacles and looked up. Yes, indeed, that was it: CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION, it said on a large brass plate to the left of the entrance. Martha parked and nodded towards the building.

  ‘It’s in there that they make copies of runic stones. I think we can learn a lot here, just you wait and see.’

  ‘You’re so full of ideas, Martha. There’s never a quiet moment with you. But it is rather exhilarating,’ chortled Brains.

  ‘I do like you, you know that?’ Martha answered, closing her eyes and leaning against his shoulder. ‘But it isn’t me who’s turned us into criminals. It’s society. If only they’d taken a bit better care of their citizens.’

  ‘Yes, but then we wouldn’t have had as much fun, would we, Martha?’ He stroked her cheek and suddenly looked very serious.

  Martha became shy and embarrassed, fumbled for the door handle and quickly opened the bus door. They got out, Brains opened the back door, and took out a little plaster statue that they had bought at a jumble sale – a fig
ure of David with a damaged head and a broken arm. Brains rang the doorbell. They had come to see a restorer and, after announcing the reason for their visit, they were let in. In the entrance they were met by an assistant who smiled a welcome. They went into an enormous open room which had stuff all over the place and wherever they looked, they saw something that needed repairing: statues in bronze or plaster, paintings and old furniture. Right at the far end there were some copies of pictorial stones made in PVC plastic which were marked as belonging to the Swedish Exhibition Agency. Martha gave Brains a little prod in the side.

  ‘Just as I thought – they still make copies in PVC plastic here.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said the restorer, as he entered the room.

  ‘I was just saying that you have such beautiful pictorial stones here,’ said Martha. ‘They look just like the real ones.’

  ‘Yes, they’ll be going out in a travelling exhibition. Handy, aren’t they? And they weigh almost nothing,’ answered the restorer, a bald overweight man wearing a stained coat.

  ‘Fantastic! The man I’ve got here was also fantastic before I dropped him on the floor,’ said Martha, stroking the little statue of David. ‘Poor David fell off the table and, well, you can see for yourself what that resulted in.’

  Martha described in detail everything that needed to be repaired, while Brains quietly stepped aside and sneakily photographed all the pictorial stones and runic stones inside the studio on his phone. He even took pictures of the cans with PVC plastic, hardener and other products used in the studio that he saw on the floor. When he had finished, Martha picked up her plaster statue, stroked David’s broken arm and said:

  ‘I’ve got several statues at home that also need repairing. If I bring them in too, perhaps we can get a good price for doing them all?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ll estimate a price for the whole lot,’ said the restorer.

  ‘Then we shall come back later.’

  ‘What about the plaster statue?’

  ‘I’ll bring that with me next time. I am so fond of looking at it,’ said Martha, patting David so hard that another little bit of plaster loosened. Then she smiled the widest smile she could, nodded to Brains, and together they left the restoration workshop.