The day before the big ransom was to be paid, the five friends took a taxi to the Viking Line ferry terminal, where they bought their tickets. Anna-Greta paid in cash, of course. The League of Pensioners sat waiting to go on board. They didn’t have their own walkers with them, as they had left these in the Princess Lilian suite in the Grand Hotel. Brains had pocketed all of his tools and they were now using frames supplied by the shipping line. They went on board the Viking Line ferry and once there put their walkers and some small items in their cabins. Then they discreetly went down the corridor, took the stairs to the car deck and walked out via the car ramp, off the ferry and onto the quay. If anybody was after them, then they would have been fooled. These five passengers were actually going on a totally different ferry.
When they were back in the Viking terminal, they fetched the Urbanista shopping trolleys they had stored there, ordered a taxi to the Silja Line terminal at Värta docks on the other side of Stockholm and managed to arrive just before the Silja Serenade ship departed. Martha was very proud of this little outflanking movement. The League of Pensioners’ feint, as she called it. Now the police and other authorities could search for them all they liked on the Viking Mariella ferry, while in actual fact they were comfortably ensconced on the Silja Line’s flagship Silja Serenade. Rake had asked her what the point of this bothersome extra outing was, and Martha had explained that she had read about leading pursuers off the trail in many crime novels. If you led them down a sidetrack, you would gain time. And hadn’t they agreed to have a bit of fun before they ended up in prison?
The five of them joked merrily about robberies and thefts while they queued for their cabins on Silja Serenade. The passengers standing closest to them cast an amused glance at the happy-go-lucky group of pensioners and couldn’t help but smile. Perhaps growing old wasn’t so bad after all? When Martha and the others had got their plastic key cards, they didn’t go directly to the cabins but wheeled their black shopping trolleys to the elevator and pressed the button to go down to the car deck. Once they were down there, amidst the lorries and cars, nobody paid them any attention and they could walk unhindered along the side of the ship towards the ramp. En route they examined every partition and recess, searching for a good place to hide things. It was damp, there were pools of water here and there and it smelt of diesel, but that didn’t bother them. They were all concentrating deeply on their purpose. Close to the ramp they caught sight of the partition meant for boots and rain clothes. A wooden box and two large duffel bags could be seen on the floor.
‘Here!’ said Martha triumphantly, and they carefully pushed their black shopping trolleys in among the rain clothes. To be on the safe side, they looked over their shoulder to ensure that nobody had seen them and then quickly went on their way. Admittedly, they were not going to get the ransom until the return journey to Stockholm, but this way they could test whether the shopping trolleys would be left in peace or whether the police had set up a trap, and this would give them a little bit of distance from the stolen goods.
The morning sun shone into the Princess Lilian suite, making the grand piano and the grey carpet sparkle. The young hotel cleaner, Petra Strand, puffed the cushions on the sofa and shook them out the window. She had vacuumed the carpets and cleaned the bathroom as well as dusting all the furniture. She straightened her back and fluffed up her newly washed red hair with her fingers. Now she had finished cleaning the room, the fun part was next. She was going to make an inventory of the decorations in the various rooms and see what could be improved. She was admittedly only a cleaner, but when the hotel management found out that she studied art, surely they would want to hear her opinion about colour schemes and fittings and decorations. Even though mainly older people were guests at the Grand Hotel, the Internet revolution meant that many younger millionaires had also started to stay there. She was exactly the right person to help the management of the hotel adjust to the times and see to it that their new clients felt at home.
Petra threw a glance at the sunlit palace across the water in front of the hotel, put her duster into the cleaning trolley and then walked all round the suite. While she studied the decorations, carpets and textiles, she thought about what could be improved. The dominant colours in the suite were white, grey and black, and she liked the deep-pile wall-to-wall carpet, which had a slightly silverish tone. The turquoise floral bedspreads matched the magnificent view, and even the rooms with the somewhat lighter shades were stylish. But … something was lacking: the decoration in the 330 square metres of the suite did, without doubt, need something more. Perhaps some new paintings?
Her first impression was that the works of art were a little ‘tame’ and she would rather see more dashing colours adorning the walls. A large painting depicting a sailing ship had been hung up above the bed in one of the bedrooms, there was an etching in the corridor next to the kitchen, and two small still lifes hung on the walls in the library. She came to a halt in front of two small oil paintings above the grand piano. They looked fairly decent, but no more than that. One of them portrayed some small cargo vessels and fishing boats in an estuary, and the other was some sort of Paris exterior with a man and a woman at a café. The painting with the river motif was dominated by brown, dirty-grey colours and had far too many vessels and boats in relation to the area of water. The Paris exterior wasn’t much better. The woman at the café was shown from behind and the man looked strange with his long hair, enormous moustache and a hat which didn’t fit with the period. There was too much of everything, and it would have been enough to have just the woman’s hat in the painting. Nevertheless, the motif seemed familiar. She had a closer look. It did actually remind her of a work by Renoir. The great masters were often copied but the results were usually poor. This was by one of the many artists who had clearly failed. Regardless, the two paintings didn’t look good above the grand piano. She would rather see a large modern painting there. Why not an Ola Billgren, a Cecilia Edefalk or a Picasso? Quickly she lifted down the two paintings, put them on her cleaning trolley and took the elevator down to the annex.
The rooms in the annex were being renovated and the paintings from these rooms had been taken down, and they leaned against the wall in some of the rooms which were going to be repainted. Petra looked through the paintings and studied each one carefully. One of them reminded her of a genuine Chagall, and the largest, a Matisse-like watercolour, would look perfect above the grand piano.
She left the paintings from the Princess Lilian suite on the trolley, put the other two under her arm and went up with them. With great enthusiasm, she hung first one and then the other above the piano. Then she took a few expectant steps back into the centre of the room. Her eyes lit up. It looked so very much better this way! The management would be really pleased!