I pride myself on being quite a wily old bird, one of those naturally suspicious individuals who is not easily fooled. You have to get up pretty early in the morning… etc, etc. But last week I was stitched up like a kipper and I am £200 poorer as a result. My only excuse is that the fraudster in question was a middle-class housewife.
The saga began when my wife and I decided we would like our five-year-old daughter to start having piano lessons. To that end, my wife contacted her friend Kate who runs a small music school in west London to see if she knew of any good second-hand pianos we might buy. Kate told her she could go one better than that: a friend of her sister-in-law’s had a piano she wanted to get rid of. Provided we were prepared to pay a removals company to collect the instrument and bring it round to our house, we could have it for nothing.
At this point, I should have arranged for a piano-tuner to go and take a look at it. But because the owner was a friend of a friend — ‘She comes from a good family,’ said Kate — we assumed the instrument would be perfectly serviceable. In any event, we had no reason to be suspicious because at that stage we didn’t know that it costs upwards of £200 to dump a piano — the same amount, in fact, that the removals company charged us. It simply did not occur to us that a person ‘from a good family’ would take advantage of our naivety to save themselves some money.
The piano duly arrived and we cleared a space for it in the sitting-room.
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