LONDON

The Usual Sandgasse Suspects

Marlene leaned back against her seat as the train clanked out of Barcelona Station, heading ultimately towards Vienna, and a return to the aptly named “Sandgasse” bunker. She allowed herself a little smile. Her recent audacious escape from the international law enforcement agencies was only the last in a long line of teenage mayhem inflicted on unsuspecting communities throughout Europe during the late 80s. She was confident that she would reconnect with the other members of her gang: the Notorious Norris Sisters, and Mad-Eyes Page.

One of Marlene’s strengths was her deceptively unassuming appearance. With her slight build and elfin features; her charming freckles and apparently guileless green eyes; and frankly the sort of hair no self-respecting villain would admit to, Marlene had outfoxed her ham-fisted pursuers for several years. She was 17 years old.

She had made her debut in France, leading the gang of delinquents on a rampage through a sleepy town by the name of Amboise, nestled

somewhere or other in the Loire Valley. Having set up a base in the nearby hamlet of Lussault, the gang carefully planned their attack.

At first they seemed to be like any other group of youthful holiday makers, harmless and wide-eyed. But their local connections allowed them to embed themselves with local bon vivants, and before long the beer was flowing in a frankly unseemly way. If only the local bar owners, not to say the Gendarmerie, had understood their creed (well-documented in the seminal and seditious motion picture ‘The Breakfast Club’: “If he gets up – we’ll all get up; it’ll be ANARCHY!”) – then what followed might have been avoided. As it turned out, the blameless citizens of Amboise were subjected to a four-girl riot. Linking arms in a mockery of harmless camaraderie, the young thugs roamed the streets shouting “Quatre Bieres!” repeatedly. Shutters came down. They were not served.

When they realised that Interpol had picked up their trail, one of the gang ran interference by urinating in the street. Others hailed (some say hijacked) a local taxi. No local drivers have come forward to admit that their car was involved. The gang piled in and the car sped off towards their hideout in Lussault. Friis, unconstrained by delicacy or dignity, vomited copiously out of the getaway vehicle; the effluence hit the pursuing Police cars, there followed a pile-up worthy of the Blues Brothers, and the gang got an early taste of invincibility and freedom.

How could anyone suspect that the marauders would next hit Copenhagen? Peaceful, civilised, and quite frankly far too expensive for a similar riot demanding the right to be sold beer, it seemed so unlikely. But Marlene Friis was nothing if not resourceful. She had early on identified the Carlsberg Brewery as a suitable target. The gang signed up for a tour of the Brewery, as many tourists do; promised one free beer at the end of the tour. But Friis struck just as the guides thought it was safe: bursting into a well-known Danish football song in which the opposition is promised they will be crushed and taken home in a “Trillebore” (wheelbarrow), the patriotic guides were blissfully unaware of the rest of the gang systematically fleecing the Brewery of all the beer that wasn’t, as it were, nailed down.

By the time the extent of the carnage had been discovered, the gang were already miles away. Friis had activated a safe house under the control of a kindly-seeming elderly gentleman known to some as “Farfar”. She calculated, quite rightly, that no one would suspect that the gang would hide out in a place called Middelfart. After all, it was so remote that no one could hear you, well, fart. They were gone. Interpol had to concede defeat yet again.

As Marlene leant back in her seat on the shabby and impersonal train (so unlike the wonderfully comfortable air travel she would become used to in later life), she smiled as she recalled her latest triumph. The gang had managed to lie low in Spain for a while. Her trusted lieutenants had been sent on to the Sandgasse bunker; and this last coup was to be entirely her own. Targeting a local supermarket, she had come up with the ingenious idea of hitting their water supplies. Before anyone realised what was happening, water was spouting from every container, pipe and faucet. Anarchy! While the staff ran in circles and customers fainted in coils, Marlene walked away, for all the world like just a young girl with a slightly damaged bottle of water no one had had the heart to charge her for. No one at Barcelona Station paid her any mind as she boarded the train.

Where is she now? No one really knows. However, some say she was recently seen at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, casing the joint together with one of her old gang members. Could a major art heist be on the cards? There is a rumour of an inside man. . . - PHILIPPA (“PIP”) PAGE, LONDON