Part one

The Brenner family rang at my gate one Tuesday in February, at ten o’clock sharp, with a tape measure, two children in anoraks and a notarised deed saying my house belonged to them.

At first I took them for lost walkers. In Benahavís, in the hills above Marbella, you see them all winter: Germans in hiking boots looking for the path along the Guadalmina, who end up outside our gates, red-faced and out of breath. I opened the kitchen window, mug of tea in hand, and shouted in my pensioner’s Spanish that the path was further down, after the second hairpin.

The man smiled. Tall, blond, ironed shirt, the look of a dentist on holiday. He held up a blue plastic folder.

“Mister Pritchard? We are not lost. We are the new owners. We have come to measure the windows, for the curtains.”

I’m seventy-one. I spent thirty-eight years calculating bridges for the county council in West Yorkshire. I know the moment when a structure starts to give. It’s always very calm, just before.

I should explain how an old engineer from Leeds ends up on an Andalusian hillside, in his slippers, facing a dentist from Düsseldorf.

Maureen and I bought the Casa de las Adelfas in 2009, with the money from our house in Headingley and a good chunk of our savings. Four bedrooms, a tiled roof that leaks over the garage, the sea in the distance when the air is dry, and oleanders everywhere, which Maureen used to water in the evenings with a hose that was too short. She died four years ago. I kept the hose. I kept the house. I kept Biscuit, our old terrier, who can’t see much any more but still barks at the right moments.

When you live alone in the sun, you quickly become everyone’s friend. On Thursdays, I go to the quiz at the Royal Oak, an English pub in San Pedro Alcántara where the beer is too expensive and the fish and chips surprisingly decent. That was where, last spring, I met the Ashdowns.

Rupert and Felicity Ashdown. Fifty-something and tanned, from Surrey, perfect teeth and a laugh that filled the room. They bought rounds. They knew the names of everybody’s grandchildren. They had a small business, Ashdown Iberian Homes, and a rare talent: they found properties off the market.

“Spanish families fighting over an inheritance,” Rupert would explain, lowering his voice. “Six brothers and sisters, nobody wants to pay the inheritance tax, everybody wants money fast and quiet. We sort it out discreetly. Twenty-five per cent under the asking price. No estate agent. No photos on the internet.”

Derek and Pam, my quiz partners for ten years, had bought a flat in Nueva Andalucía through them. They talked about it as if it were a miracle. Half the pub wanted to go through the Ashdowns.

I wasn’t buying anything. But Felicity often came to see me. She would drive up with a lemon drizzle cake, sit on the terrace and get me talking about Maureen. She took photos of the garden “for her Instagram”. She went into raptures over the old beams in the living room.

And in the autumn, when I grumbled about my Spanish tax return, Rupert offered to do it for me. Free of charge. “Between fellow Brits.” I gave him a copy of my passport, my NIE number, Maureen’s green folder with the title deeds and the receipts for the property tax. I signed a few forms on the pub table, between two questions about the kings of England.

I remember thinking: what charming people.

On my terrace that Tuesday, Klaus Brenner took out his documents one by one, with the care of a man who had paid a great deal for them.

An escritura de compraventa, a deed of sale, signed on 12 January at the office of Don Ignacio Ruiz Cabello, notary, Avenida Ricardo Soriano, Marbella. Price: 640,000 euros. Seller: Graham Pritchard, “represented under a notarised power of attorney by Mr Rupert Ashdown”. Then a nota simple, the extract from the property register, with Klaus’s name and his wife Heike’s in place of mine.

“Mr Ashdown told us you were going into a care home in England,” Heike said gently. “That you didn’t want to see anyone, that it was too painful. That you would leave the keys with the notary on 15 February.”

I looked at the signature at the bottom of the power of attorney. It was mine. Exactly mine. The one I had put down on the table at the Royal Oak, somewhere between the Battle of Hastings and the death of Henry VIII.

I rang Rupert. Voicemail. I rang Felicity. “The number you have dialled has not been recognised.”

The little Brenner boy, seven or eight, had found Biscuit and was scratching his ears. He asked me whether the dog came with the house.

I made tea for everyone. It’s what an Englishman does when the world falls apart: he puts the kettle on.

Klaus was pale. He had sold his practice in Düsseldorf for this house. All their savings, plus a loan from his mother-in-law. They had transferred the money into the “notary’s escrow account”, as they had been asked to. They had even paid the transfer tax. Heike was crying silently, stirring her tea.

I tried to think the way I used to at work. An abnormal load. A breaking point. Find the crack.

I thought back to Felicity’s afternoons on this terrace. Her questions about the size of the plot, “for a friend”. Her photos of the living room, the pool, the view. I had thought she was interested in me. She was taking an inventory. She was putting together the brochure for a house she had never needed to buy.

“Did you go to the land registry yourselves?” I asked.

“Mr Ashdown sent us the link. The official website. We saw our names.”

It was just after two when Biscuit started barking again.

A white hire car had stopped outside the gate. A couple got out, in their sixties, very tall, very blond, with that happy look people have on the first day of their holidays. The woman was carrying a bouquet wrapped in brown paper. The man was holding a blue plastic folder.

“Hej!” the woman called, waving. “Sorry to disturb you. We are Ingrid and Mats Sandberg, from Gothenburg. We just wanted to see the house again before we move in. And to thank the previous owner, if he is still here.”

Klaus stood up. He looked at the blue folder. Then at his own.

My house had been sold twice.