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. My wife then suggested we send the previous owner a bunch of flowers to thank her for her generosity — and this is the point at which the story gets truly embarrassing. My wife suggested a £25 bunch of flowers, but I insisted on a more expensive bunch. After all, I argued, a decent second-hand piano can cost upwards of £500.
I arranged for a piano-tuner to come and service the instrument and it was only then that I discovered we had been had. Not only was the piano in such bad condition that it wasn’t worth repairing, but it also had live woodworm and live moth. ‘You need to get it out of here as a matter of urgency,’ he said, glancing at our wooden floor and soft furnishings.
Naturally, my wife called Kate to put her in the picture and she was so mortified she immediately arranged for the piano to be picked up and dumped at a reduced cost by the removals company she uses regularly. Kate was adamant that her sister-in-law’s friend had acted in good faith and said she would call her. As soon as she discovered her mistake, Kate said, she’d offer to reimburse us for the removals cost.
In fact, her sister-in-law’s friend did nothing of the kind. She protested her innocence and said she’d discuss it with her husband but it was unlikely he would agree to reimbursing us. Needless to say, she never called Kate back and she hasn’t returned any of my calls, either. Clearly, in the absence of the housewife in question feeling any sort of moral obligation to refund us, there is nothing we can do.
My wife, being less cynical than me, is inclined to give Kate’s friend the benefit of the doubt. But I am convinced of her guilt. She told Kate she had the instrument tuned regularly and it is inconceivable that a tuner would have overlooked its shortcomings. If, as Kate believes, she acted in good faith, why wouldn’t she at least offer to split the cost of dumping the piano? No, she knew she had a worthless, potentially dangerous instrument on her hands, and she realised that giving it away was a clever way of avoiding the disposal costs.
‘Happens all the time in this business,’ says Simon Markson, the managing director of Markson Pianos. ‘This week we picked up a piano its owner described as a “treasure” and it turned out to be worthless. The golden rule is you should always pay a piano-tuner to go and give the instrument a thorough looking over before you part with any cash. If you pick one up sight unseen, you might get lucky, but for every lucky person there’ll be ten unlucky ones.’ My wife and I were among the unlucky ones.
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