Within two weeks Ms Spence was dead, having been kidnapped and tortured at a property in West Kilbride where she was taped to a chair, beaten with a golf club and left to sit in her own mess with her mouth sealed shut.

Despite the physical and mental cruelty she had been placed under, Ms Spence spent those last two weeks largely in darkness, the lenses of her Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses blacked out with industrial tape.

Her days were spent waiting for Colin Coats and Philip Wade to arrive and continue their interrogation, desperate for details about Coats's missing money. As the pressure intensified on her to impart information, her thumb was chopped off and taken away by Coats, who paraded it around his Glasgow contacts as a malign threat.

But there was no money left for Coats to have, his one-time friend Ms Spence having spent it all – largely on clearing debts – as her own low-rent crooked empire began to crumble.

Graeme Pearson MSP, former director general of the Scottish Drug and Crime Enforcement Agency and former assistant chief constable at Strathclyde, described a "thieves' kitchen" with the honour among associates evaporating as deals started to unravel.

He said: "The shortcoming of the victim is she didn't realise she was working with people who didn't show any empathy – or even humanity."

Lynda Spence left school and took her first job at a bank in Glasgow but within a decade she had become tangled in a string of false identities, dodgy deals and numerous associations with criminals.

These included an Albanian, Sokol Zefaj, an alleged gangster who she apparently married in secret as her illegal business activities swung deeper into illegitimate – and dangerous – territory.

In 2010, her mother Patricia noticed a change in her daughter. But she put it down to her daughter just being busy.

And she had been. Ms Spence had been living large on the proceeds of numerous scams, one being a wholesale mortgage fraud on the Chinese community in Glasgow. At her old mortgage brokers premises, Fraser Properties in Great Western Road, large sums of money would arrive in brown envelopes and, if they were short, you could maybe hear her joke about a few fingers needing to be broken.

All the while, she was regarded for her generosity among her peers, the Cristal champagne corks popping and the designer jewellery sparkling.

Her girlfriend in her final months was former Gucci model Alione Codreanu, a Ukranian whose whereabouts is currently unknown.

Supporting the lifestyle of Lynda Spence was a quickly failing criminal enterprise.

But there was one deal that was to make Ms Spence and her associates a lot of money – a land development at Stansted Airport that she boasted would make her millions. It was an audacious plot even by the standards of the former employee of the Co-operative Bank and HSBC – and it proved to be her downfall.

The land was to be bought using fake Danish government bonds essentially pieced together using images found on the internet. It was when these could not be authenticated that Colin Coats, a former close friend of Ms Spence who had invested in the airport deal, was to turn against her.

Mr Pearson said: "They would never accept she didn't have a nest egg and by the time they realised there was nothing to be gained, it was too late for Lynda."