‘This could have happened to anyone, Mrs Lawson,’ the police officer told me the day I found out, but she was just being kind because I was crying and she could see a cup of tea wasn’t going to cut it. (Morphine, maybe.)

No, this could only happen to someone like me, someone too idealistic, too forgiving. Someone who’d deluded herself into thinking she could reform nature itself. Make a weak man strong. Yes, that old chestnut.

Why am I taking part in this series? Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m a very private person, so why open myself to mockery or pity or worse? Well, partly because I want to warn people that this really can happen. Property fraud is on the rise: there are stories in the press every day, the police and legal profession are playing catch-up with technology. Homeowners need to be vigilant: there’s no limit to what professional criminals will try – or, for that matter, amateur ones.

Also, this is an ongoing investigation and my story might nudge a memory, might encourage someone who has relevant information to get in touch with the police. Sometimes you don’t know what’s relevant until you hear the proper context, that’s why the police don’t mind my doing this – well, they haven’t asked me not to, let’s put it that way. As you probably know, I can’t be compelled to testify against Bram in a trial, thanks to spousal privilege (that’s a laugh). We’re still married, though I’ve considered us exes since the day I threw him out. Of course, I could choose to testify, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, my solicitor says.

To be honest, I get the feeling she thinks there won’t ever be any prosecution. I get the feeling she thinks he’s got a new identity by now, a new home, a new life – all bought with his new fortune.

She says it’s ever-expanding, the lengths to which people will go to cheat one another.

Even husband and wife.

Speaking of which, you said this has a good chance of being heard by him, that it might be the factor that prompts him to get in touch? Well, let me tell you right now, let me tell him – and I don’t care what the police think:

Don’t even think about coming back, Bram. I swear, if you do, I’ll kill you.

#VictimFi

@rachelb72 Where’s the husband then? Has he done a runner?

@patharrisonuk @rachelb72 He must have disappeared with the cash. Wonder how much the house was worth?

@Tilly-McGovern @rachelb72 @patharrisonuk Her HUSBAND did this? Wow. The world is a dark place.

Bram Lawson, excerpted from a Word document emailed from Lyon, France, March 2017

Let me remove any doubt straight away and tell you that this is a suicide note. By the time you read this, I’ll have done it. Break the news gently, please. I may be a monster, but I’m still a father and there are two boys who’ll be sorry to lose me, who’ll have reason to remember me more kindly.

Maybe even their mother too, a one-in-a-million woman whose life must be a nightmare now, thanks to me.

And who, may I say for the record, I have never stopped loving.

3

‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:03:10

Ruinous though the situation is, catastrophic even, it is also quite fitting that it’s ended the way it has, because it has always been about the house. Our marriage, our family, our life: they only seemed to make proper sense at home. Take us out of it – even on one of the smart holidays we used to treat ourselves to when the kids were very young and we very sleep-deprived – and the glue would ooze away. The house sheltered us and protected us, but it also defined us. It kept us current long after our expiry date.

Plus, let’s be frank, this is London, and in recent years the house had earned more in capital growth than either Bram or I made from our salaries. It was the family’s primary breadwinner, our benign master. Friends and neighbours felt the same, as if our human power had been taken from us and invested in bricks and mortar. Spare cash was sunk not in pension funds or private education or marriage-salvaging weekends in Paris, but in the house. You know you’ll get it back, we told each other. It’s a no-brainer.

That reminds me of something I’d forgotten till now. That day, that terrible day when I came home and discovered the Vaughans in my house, Merle asked them outright what I hadn’t yet thought to ask: How much did you pay for it?

And even though my marriage, my family, my life had been annihilated, I still paused my sobbing to listen to the answer:

‘Two million,’ Lucy Vaughan said, in a broken whisper.

And I thought, It was worth more.

We were worth more.

*

We bought it for a quarter of that – still a substantial enough sum at the time to have caused us sleepless nights. But once I’d set eyes on 91 Trinity Avenue, I couldn’t consider being an insomniac anywhere else. It was the bourgeois confidence of its red-brick exterior, with its pale stone details and chalky white paintwork, wisteria curling onto the wrought-iron Juliet balcony above the door. Impressive but approachable, solid but romantic. Not to mention neighbours with the same sensibilities as ours. One after another, we’d rooted out this delightful spot, sacrificed a tube stop for that languidness you get in the suburbs, that sweetness, the air dusted with sugar like Turkish delight.

Inside was a different story. When I think now of all the improvements we made over the years, the energy the house absorbed (the cash!), I can’t believe we took it on in the first place. There were, in no particular order: the remodelled kitchen, the refreshed bathrooms, the reimagined gardens (rear and front), the refurbished downstairs cloakroom, the repaired sash windows, the restored timber flooring. Then, when the ‘re-’ verbs had run out, there was a slew of new: new French doors from kitchen to garden, new kitchen cupboards and worktop, new fitted wardrobes in the boys’ bedrooms, new glazed partition in the dining area, new railings and gate for the front, new playhouse and slide out back . . . On it went, a constant programme of renewal, Bram and I (well, mostly I) like the directors of a charitable body carving up its annual budget, all free time spent canvassing for price quotes, booking and supervising labour, searching on-and offline for fittings and fixtures and the implements needed to fit and fix them, curating colours and textures. And the tragic fact is never, ever did I stand back and say ‘It’s done!’ The idea of the perfect house eluded me like a rake in an old romance novel.