Perfect Fruition
I am the world’s worst con man. Every swindle, every scheme, all the beautiful lies and deceptions I deploy come to perfect fruition. The problem is, the fruition is always good. Completely and utterly wholesome. Legal. Profitable for everyone involved, except the geezer who planned the crime. Me.
It all started with the Nigerian prince. I’m sure you know the one.
I spent weeks polishing up the email. “My dearest friend”, it sobbed, “I am a loyal and honourable agent acting in absolute and complete secrecy on behalf of his esteemed Royal Highness Prince Olufemi Adebayo. The most unfortunate coup has unjustly frozen His Highness’s personal accounts - leaving upwards of £40 million in an Isle of Man offshore account. Please do us this honest deed and help us move it to safety, and you shall keep 40%. God and Lagos will bless your discretion.” I struck send, and off it went to 1.8 million unsuspecting inboxes. I sat back waiting for a few to bite.
Instead, my phone rang the next morning, startling me awake, head on my desk where I’d drifted off the night before. A cultured voice with a perfect Oxford accent said, “Mr Hargrove? This is Prince Olufemi Adebayo. One of my aides intercepted your mass communication. How brave of you to risk your own safety on my behalf. To act as my agent while my accounts are frozen, amongst such unspeakable violence. I was penniless and my hands tied in fighting back this coup… but now… your loyalty and timing are nothing but miraculous!”
He didn’t transfer any money to me. He flew me to Lagos (at least first class), introduced me to his entire legal team, and transformed my scam list into a legitimate investor database. Every single person who replied to my email with offers of help received a personal call from the Prince, a verified contract, and shares in a new sovereign wealth fund that tripled in value over eighteen months. Grandmas in Yorkshire, retirees in Cornwall and schoolteachers in Glasgow. All of them suddenly became filthy rich, and all of them sent tearful thank-you videos.
Me? What did I get? Well, I stood on the palace balcony while the prince pinned a medal on my chest in front of BBC News. “This honest stranger’s email reminded us that trust and bravery still exist,” he declared. It was utterly baffling, both the coincidence and the fact they couldn’t see through it. The prince shook my hand, called me “brother,” and gave me a framed certificate. Humanitarian of the year. Zero commission. Not a penny. Just applause and a slap on the back so hard it left a bruise. Perfect fruition.
I was furious. So I decided I would go for the lonely hearts.
I became Enzo Soldi. Suave, widowed and tragically handsome - if you liked the mid-90s Grattan catalogue look. Linda, whom I targeted, did. 66, garden-loving, still wearing her late husband’s watch. Commemorative. A parting gift from his lifetime working down the pits. The lifetime that eventually left him dead from lung cancer, and her with a hefty coal-board pension.
Within days, we were video-calling every evening. “Enzo” positioned in low light, slightly off camera, with a terrible wig and a pencil moustache. By week five, I was nearly ready to drop the “temporary liquidity crisis” bomb.
But there was a hitch. She was getting a little clingy. I needed just a few solid hours a week without calling her, the wig was starting to chafe, and I needed some time to forge some Italian bank documents and the like. So, the next time Linda mentioned feeling stuck, I slipped into the role of supportive fake boyfriend. I played the role with aplomb. “You deserve to live again, cara. Go do something for you.” I suggested the new Italian cooking class at the local village hall.
She went. And that’s where she met Marco.
Marco. Actual Italian, actual widower, actual kind eyes and a flour-dusted apron. The regular grandad from that Dolmio advert. Within months, they were engaged, and then every day for Linda was a ‘Dolmio Day’. Realising my small window to rob her blind had closed, I abruptly ghosted her, deleting my accounts.
But Linda, bless her little cotton socks, was genuinely worried. She reported me missing. The police did a basic trace and gently broke the news: “Enzo Soldi” was a stock photo from a men’s knitwear catalogue, and his IP address was traced back to an Ibis Budget in Slough. He didn’t exist.
Instead of feeling violated, Linda had an epiphany. She realised Enzo had never asked for a single penny. He’d just listened to her, night after night, made her laugh and then selflessly pushed her out the door to meet the love of her life. So, when she married Marco, six months later, in her garden surrounded by sunflowers, I received a wedding invitation addressed to “Enzo Soldi (the best fake friend a girl ever had!)”
I tore the invitation into confetti. Perfect fruition. Yet again.
I needed a quick, classic win. Art forgery.
I bought a hideous, dirty-cheap painting of a sad clown from a charity shop on the high street for a tenner. I sanded it down slightly and painted a brilliant, fake John Constable landscape over the top of it. I’d excelled myself; this one couldn’t fail. Now I just needed a believable idiot to front up the sale. Enter Gary “The Crowbar” Sullivan, a hardened con from the Isle of Dogs with all the moral fibre of a wet Kleenex. I paid Gary £500 to walk into a Mayfair auction house and say he'd found it in his nanna's loft.
Unfortunately, the experts were immediately suspicious. They X‑rayed the canvas, ran a bit of the old ‘mass spectrometry’ on the pigments, and spotted my fake Constable straight away. I really shouldn’t have bought my paint from Hobbycraft. However, underneath my fake and underneath the original charity shop sad clown, they discovered the painting was actually a lost, authentic masterpiece by Turner, painted over twice.
It was also registered on the Art Loss database as stolen from a museum in 1973.
Naturally, questions were raised about how this particular painting had ended up in Gary’s nanna’s loft. When the museum’s lawyers arrived with the police, Gary panicked and immediately surrendered all claims to the artwork. Miraculously, he was celebrated on the evening news as an “accidental art preservationist”, a heroic citizen who had returned a national treasure.
The museum got its painting back. Perfect fruition. I, having technically destroyed my own fake, got absolutely nothing, and now Gary was breathing down my neck for the £500 I owed him.
I had to pacify him, and anyway, I still had one card left to play: I would fake my own death.
I took out a £4 million policy, with double indemnity for accidental death at sea. I made Gary the sole beneficiary of our watertight trust. The plan was simple: I go overboard during a storm, the insurance pays out to the trust, and a month later, Gary would take his cut, a significant return on his £500 I might add, and meets me in a pub in Marbella to hand over my remaining 80%. Flawless.
I bought a leaky little cabin cruiser, drilled discreet holes just below the waterline, and planted my wallet and blood-stained (food-colouring) life vest. I even paid a drunk in the local pub to swear he saw me go over in the coming storm off the Cornish coast.
It arrived right on cue. I sailed out past the breakwater, killed the engine, opened the seacocks, and stepped onto the rail like a pirate about to walk the plank. One last look at the lights along the shore. One quiet laugh at the universe.
Then the boat lurched.
The holes I’d punched through the boat were perfect. The waves were perfect. My timing was perfect. The current grabbed me like it had been waiting its whole life for this moment. My life jacket caught on the boat and ripped away. The cold water closed over my head exactly as I’d scripted. My scheme was going swimmingly.
Except I couldn’t swim back.
The undercurrent was stronger than any rehearsal. My lungs burned. I fought, and I clawed. I screamed bubbles into the dark. And in that last clear second before everything went quiet, I understood.
The con had come to perfect fruition.
The Coast Guard recovered the staged evidence alongside my body at dawn. The coroner ruled accidental drowning. The insurance company paid Gary’s trust the full £4 million within ten working days.
And that is when the universe delivered its final, cruel joke.
Gary “The Crowbar” Sullivan was completely devastated by my “sacrifice”. The tragedy of my actual death triggered a catastrophic crisis of conscience. He was going straight. While going through my fake files, a weeping Gary found my notes on Linda and assumed she was the secret love of my life. He drove straight to her house, confessed everything about the insurance money, and swore to honour my memory.
Together, the widow, the Italian chef, and the reformed East End con used every penny to build ‘The Hargrove Community Kitchen’. Free cooking classes for widows, scholarships for ex-cons, and a permanent exhibit titled “One Honest Lie That Changed Everything.”
They named it after me.
At the grand opening, they played several voice notes I’d left as “Enzo". The ones where I told Linda to "live again". They cheered. They called me a saint.
I know all this because I watched it from somewhere I can’t quite describe. Weightless. Warm. And finally, perfectly quiet.
I tried so hard to be bad. And the universe, in its infinite kindness, simply wouldn’t let me. So here I lie. Hargrove. The world’s worst con-man. Every scheme succeeded. Every mark won. Perfect fruition. I got the perfect end.
Just not the one I wanted.