The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules

Martha is transferred to the Sollentuna remand prison. She’s shocked to learn that men and women are housed separately and that, as co-conspirators, she and her friends will be kept apart to prevent them from colluding. Ashamed of this important oversight in her planning, Martha sees that the others now regret having confessed. Before they’re separated, she cryptically tells the group to demand a visit from the clergyman, signaling with a wink that she has a new plan.

Upon arriving at her small, sterile cell in Sollentuna, Martha is struck by the grim reality of prison. It feels more like a punishment than the adventure she had envisioned. Missing Brains and feeling guilty for her friends’ predicament, she resolves to immediately begin formulating a new plan. The next morning, she summons a guard, claiming that she was awake all night, troubled by a matter she needs to confess to a clergyman. The guard takes her seriously and promptly calls the prison’s spiritual adviser.

Brains, held in the men’s section of the prison, is told that he has a visit from a clergyman. Remembering Martha’s parting instruction, he goes to the visiting room, where the clergyman gives him a poem from Martha. Brains interprets her cryptic verse as a reference to the money hidden in the drainpipe and their future freedom. While the clergyman assumes that it’s a love poem, Brains understands its true purpose. To continue their secret communication, he writes an equally cryptic poem in response, signaling that he has received her message.

Martha is transferred to Hinseberg Women’s Prison, having already been convicted and sentenced. The judge had actively tried to find the group not guilty, as the evidence was thin, but lay magistrates swayed by media outrage convicted the five pensioners, who received a one-year sentence that they expect will be reduced to six months. Martha reflects on her grim stay in the remand prison, where her only comforts were the poems she exchanged with Brains, which helped her formulate a new plan. Upon arrival at Hinseberg, she’s subjected to a degrading intake process, including a strip search and cavity search, which dashes her hopes for a pleasant prison experience.

While awaiting his own transfer, Brains reviews Martha’s coded poems, which detail the money’s location and her plans for it. He also recalls an encounter in the remand prison with a Yugoslav inmate, Juro, who tried to recruit him for a bank robbery. Brains feigned incompetence to avoid getting involved but learned Juro’s criminal philosophy of treating prison as a short rest before collecting the score. Brains wonders if he and his friends can achieve a similar outcome.

At Hinseberg, Martha is in the kitchen when she’s confronted by a hostile and intimidating inmate named Liza. Liza, a repeat offender, tries to establish dominance by insulting Martha and ordering her to take on kitchen duties. She threatens to beat Martha in the showers, an area with insulated walls and no windows, if she doesn’t comply. Martha remains calm and stands her ground.

At the Värta docks, Janson and Allanson’s storage shed is nearly empty after they successfully sold the stolen bicycles and mopeds. They plan another heist for the weekend, but Allanson first needs to visit his mother at her retirement home for her birthday. Unsure what gift to buy, Allanson takes Janson’s suggestion to give her the black shopping trolley they kept from their last haul, intending to remove the old newspapers from it first.

The next morning, Martha prepares breakfast for the other inmates at Hinseberg but deliberately doesn’t set a place for Liza. When Liza arrives and angrily demands her coffee, Martha coolly tells her where to find a cup. After Liza grabs her blouse, Martha calmly removes her hands. The other inmates start laughing, and Liza, realizing that she can’t assault an elderly woman without losing face, backs down. She gets her own breakfast and leaves in silence.

Petra returns to work after a vacation. While reading an old newspaper, she sees an article about the museum theft, including pictures of the stolen Renoir and Monet. She suspects that they may be the same paintings she removed from the Princess Lilian suite, noting that they’re very similar despite a few alterations. Panicked that she might be implicated in the theft, she begins to frantically search for the paintings.

Allanson visits his mother, Dolores, at Diamond House for her birthday and gives her the black shopping trolley, having forgotten to remove the old papers from it beforehand. He leaves it in her room. 

Meanwhile, at the Grand Hotel, Petra continues her search in the annex. In a bathroom, inside a box of donations set aside for the Salvation Army, she finds two paintings.

Petra retrieves the paintings and compares them to printouts from the museum’s website, confirming that they’re the stolen works. When she rubs the paintings with a damp handkerchief, the watercolor alterations that Christina made come up. Upon hearing colleagues approach, she hides and devises a plan: She will take the paintings home, wait for a reward to be offered, and then return them, positioning herself as a hero who saved priceless art.