It wasn’t my dream home. The bay window had been replaced by a PVC box, the walls were wrinkled, the windows were drained and the pipes groaned every time I turned on the heating. It was freezing in the winter and, I would learn, I had a problem with slugs in the summer. On a street in Walthamstow, north-east London, lined with Victorian windowed terraces, mine stood out like a cracked tooth. The divorce had hurt. After a decade together, five of them got married, there was no emotional or physical abuse, no infidelity. love has just thickened. Plus, there’s nothing like new parenthood to expose the cracks in a marriage. “Daddy,” said our daughter at bedtime right after the separation, “when I’m a baby again, are you and mommy going to live together like when I was a baby before?” It turns out that explaining to a toddler that time moves inexorably in one direction is a lot easier than explaining why two adults can no longer share a house. So the first time I turned the key on that gray January day at the height of the pandemic, I felt excited. This house represented a new future for both of them. I never thought about his past. “There’s something wrong with your boards,” said my brother. As we lifted the carpet, we saw it – a large black patch “The first thing you do when you move into a new house is wipe all memory of the previous owners,” my brother, Nick, said a few weeks later. “And we can start with that disgusting rug in the front bedroom.” The carpet was a brownish gray, like rat fur. And stubbornly stuck to the floor. But with crowbar and brute force, he slowly began to submit. Suddenly, Nick stopped pulling and stood up. “Something’s wrong with your boards.” The more we pulled, the more we saw it – a shapeless black patch, about the size of a double bed, in the center of the room. Some of the paintings looked chewed and peppered with white and gray spots where there had obviously been some kind of fire. My home buyer research had mentioned none of this. While the damage was cosmetic, it didn’t take a carpenter to see that the boards needed to be replaced. Most fires start in kitchens, not bedrooms. This was obviously small, right where a bed should have been once and where my bed was now. The next morning, I looked back at all the images ever taken of the house on Google Street View. One, from August 2008, showed the house exactly as it is now except for corrugated iron where the windows should have been. Above the window frames soot marks curled across the front of the house like eyelashes. The gutters had melted, cracked and the white facade paint was peeling. I sent a Freedom of Information request to the London Fire Brigade, asking for a list of every call on my street over the past 20 years. Since 2000, nearly a third of the 20 calls firefighters have responded to have been to one address: mine. Four “malicious false alarms” and two “primary fires”. Even more strangely, five of these incidents (including both fires) had taken place within a seven-month period between February and September 2008. The fire department would not tell me if anyone had died or been injured, and the police would not. ». to help. A trawl of the local newspaper of the time turned up nothing. I went outside and looked at the house. It had obviously been repaired. Two doors down, I saw Jackie – who has lived on the street for 20 years – smoking on her front step. I asked if he knew anything about fires. “Oh yeah, we all called yours The Fire House,” he said. Jackie also told me that she remembered the man who had lived there at the time. he would light fires in the bedroom and then sit on the opposite wall to wait for the fire brigade. “A fire was so destructive,” he said, “I thought it would destroy our house with it.” He put ashes in a pot. “Of course, he’s in jail now for raping these women. Killed one in the playground around the corner. The papers called him the E17 Night Stalker.’ When Aman Vyas came to London from India, he was 24. A university graduate whose father was a teacher, he moved into this house in 2008, got a job in a dry cleaner and a girlfriend around his age. He also had a terrible secret. A jury at Croydon crown court heard that between March 24 and May 30, 2009, he had assaulted four women aged between 32 and 59. Always at night, always near his home: in a cemetery, an alley and a woman’s house, where he had forced entry. His latest victim was a 35-year-old widow named Michelle Samaraweera. He tracked her down at 1am in the local supermarket, where she had gone to buy milk, and killed her in the playground 50 meters up the road. Police had DNA but initially found no match. In what became one of the biggest manhunts in British police history, they tested more than 1,000 local men, posted door-to-door leaflets and appealed to the BBC’s Crimewatch. Finally, the research yielded a name. By then, Vyas had gotten wind of the appeal and bought a one-way ticket to India, where he hoped to avoid extradition. Meanwhile, Samaraweera’s family, and those of Vyas’ other victims, faced an unimaginable wait for justice. Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy led a campaign to bring him back. Local women marched. It wasn’t until 2019, after a 10-year extradition battle with Indian authorities, that British detectives brought him home to stand trial. “Aman Vyas had over 11 years to come clean and admit to raping and murdering my sister, and even more to admit to all the other heinous crimes committed against the other innocent victims,” his sister Samaraweera told the court during his trial. “Instead, he lied and made up stories for his own benefit. He will never understand what he put my mother, my sisters, my children, my loved ones, my friends and myself through.’ I became darkly obsessed with what he had done. When I was alone, I started imagining him here Summing up, the judge told him: “You showed neither compassion nor remorse for your victims throughout your trial, putting those who were alive and could remember events through the ordeal of reliving events, while you continued to protest the your innocence to the bitter end, concocting increasingly fanciful versions of events as you struggled to explain away the weight of evidence against you.” Vyas was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum term of 37 years before being considered for parole. As far as I know, Vios didn’t commit any of his crimes inside the house and no one died here, at least not at his hands. But he lived there. Where he came home, he was cleansed. Some of my neighbors still remember him. “He keeps himself to himself,” Jackie’s partner Mike told me. “Not rude, but not friendly. I don’t think I ever heard him speak. He was always looking at the ground when he passed by.” All houses have a history. But how much do we think about what happened to them before we moved? Like most people, I treated this house’s past like the junk folder in my email: you know there might be bad stuff in there, but as long as you never open it, it can’t do any harm. That night, after I finished reading the court report, I found myself looking in corners of the room to check if the shadows were still where they should be. For a time, I became darkly obsessed with my house as the stage for Via’s corruption. He became wrapped up in the horror of what he was doing. Time passed. I tore out the charred boards and replaced them with new ones. My daughter started primary school at the end of our street. However, walking home, my concern remained. When I was alone, I started imagining him here. Did that third step squeak on his way up to sleep? Did he get the front door key stuck when he let himself in? Some nights, as my daughter slept, I would wildly imagine what she did when she got home after committing the crimes. I never found out why he started the fires. They don’t fit the timeline of the crimes he was convicted of – the last was a few months before the first rape. My guess is that it made him feel powerful. But this is all speculation. In 2010 the novelist Harriet Evans bought a new house with her partner on Danbury Street, north London. They moved and unpacked their boxes, but for Evans, something didn’t feel right. The place was always cold, none of the door handles worked and there was a mouse infestation that they couldn’t fix. “It just had a vibe,” says Evans. “Then I found out we were the fifth people to buy it in 10 years.” Evans Googled the address. “It was all over the Internet,” he recalls. “The last thing you want is to see your new home described as one of the most notorious houses in north London.” In 1902, a woman named Annie Walters had murdered two babies in a room she rented on the property. He had engaged in “baby farming” – demanding payment from desperate single mothers in exchange for giving their unwanted newborns a better life. “I was trying to have a baby at the time, and the idea that these babies had been murdered there was incredibly painful,” says Evans. “For a while it freaked me out, partly because I had recently quit my job to write full-time and was in a state of high anxiety and depression, so it wasn’t a good time in my life anyway.” “Houses with horror stories can be hard to sell,” says estate agent Reuben John, director of sales for M&M…
