"The more you moved the carpet back, the more you saw": what I learned from buying a house with a dark past

In January 2021, 18 months after a delicate divorce, I bought a house. I bought it partly because I could – my ex-wife and I had lucked out on the property ladder and came away with enough money for a deposit each. But also, I bought it because I was desperate. With shared custody of our two-year-old daughter, I needed a place where she could be happy and where I could get back on my feet. was not my dream house. The bay window had been replaced with a PVC box, the walls were wobbly, the windows were drafty and the pipes creaked as soon as I turned on the heating. It was very cold in the winter and I would learn there was a slug problem in the summer. On a road in Walthamstow, northeast London, lined with Victorian terraces with bay windows, mine stood out like a cracked tooth.

The divorce had hurt. After a decade together, five of them were married, there had been no emotional or physical abuse, no infidelity; love just curdled. Plus, there's nothing like new parenthood to expose the cracks in a marriage. "Daddy," our daughter said at bedtime shortly after the separation, "when I'm a baby again, are you and mommy going to live together like you did when I was a baby before? " It turns out explaining to a toddler that time inexorably flies one way is much easier than explaining why two adults can no longer share a home.

So the first time I turned the key on that gray day in January, at the height of the pandemic, I felt elated. This house represented a new future for both of us. I never once thought about his past.

"The first thing you do when you move into a new house is erase all memory of the old ones owners," my brother, Nick, said a few weeks later. "And we can start with that disgusting rug in the front bedroom." The rug was a brownish gray, like rat fur. And he clung stubbornly to the ground. But with a crowbar and brute force, he slowly began to submit. Suddenly Nick stopped shooting and stood up. "There's something wrong with your boards."

The more we pulled, the more we saw: an amorphous black stain, the size of a bed double, in the center of the Chamber. Some of the boards looked chewed up and dotted with white and gray spots where there had obviously been some kind of fire. My survey of home buyers had mentioned none of this. Even though the damage was superficial, it didn't take a carpenter to see that the boards needed replacing.

Most fires start in kitchens, not in the rooms. This one was obviously small, exactly where a bed must have been once, and where my bed was now. The next morning I looked at every image ever taken of the house on Google Street View. One, from August 2008, showed the house as it is now, except for the corrugated iron sheets where the windows should have been. Above the window frames, marks of soot curled up the facade of the house like eyelashes. The gutters were melted, mangled and the white plaster on the facade was peeling.

I sent a Freedom of Information request to the London Fire Department asking a list of every call-up on my street for the last 20 years. Since 2000, nearly a third of the 20 calls firefighters have responded to have been to a single address: mine. Four "malicious false alarms" and two "primary fires". Stranger still, five of these incidents (including the two fires) occurred over a seven-month period, between February and September 2008. Firefighters would not tell me if anyone was dead or injured, and the police didn't want to help you. A search of the local newspaper at the time turned up nothing.

I got out and looked up at the house. It had clearly been repaired. Two doors down, I saw Jackie – who has lived on the streets for 20 years – smoking on her doorstep. I asked if she knew about the fires. "Oh yeah, we all used to call yours The Fire House," she said. Jackie also told me she remembered the man who lived there at the time; he used to light fires in the bedroom, then sit on the opposite wall to wait for the firefighters. "A fire was so bad," she said, "I thought it was going to destroy our house with it."

She drew ashes from a flower pot. “Of course he is now in prison for raping these women. He killed one in the playground around the corner. Newspapers called him the E17 Night Stalker. this house in 2008, found a job with a dry cleaner and a girlfriend about his age. He also had a terrible secret. A jury at Croydon Crown Court heard that between March 24 and May 30, 2009, he...