A nice woman rented my room – then I discovered her boyfriend’s identity

Looking around the small double room, I surveyed the damage done by my previous tenants – the ones I had to bribe to leave.

My stomach churned. 

Sifting through the trash felt like decluttering the bowels of hell – stolen box sets, perfume, and trainers, all in original packaging with security tags intact, were stacked high. 

It was then that I uncovered drug paraphernalia and weapons. I counted 22 knives of varying lengths, dotted around the room.

I immediately called a locksmith and secured the house; they changed the ones on both the bedroom door and the front door, as well as adding locks to all the windows.

It felt like the weight of the world had been taken off my shoulders. 

This was a far cry from my initial meeting with Lucy* who had called me looking for a room to rent. 

My first impressions of her were favourable, and her references all checked out – I had no reason to doubt her suitability as a tenant. 

As we completed the paperwork, she asked if her boyfriend could occasionally stay with her.

In my 10 years of being a landlord I’d often discovered stray partners in houses without permission, so it was refreshing to have Lucy be so upfront. 

‘Yes, that’s fine,’ I said magnanimously. 

This decision would eventually haunt me. 

The house I was renting out was a house of multiple occupancy (HMO) with six rooms rented to individuals. When I met Lucy, the other five rooms were occupied by lovely South African nurses who were not only respectful of one another, but treated the house as their home.

Two days after Lucy moved in, I received a phone call from one of the existing tenants.

‘Geoff, who have you rented the downstairs room to?’

I was told there was ‘a scruffy, rude man’ hanging around the kitchen, and to my horror, ‘a constant stream of strange people’ were coming to the house at all times of the day and night. 

I phoned Lucy and she told me her boyfriend had come to stay, and simply had a lot of friends visiting him. 

Her attitude was completely different to any other tenant I’d had. She was hard, defiant, entitled and I immediately felt suspicious. I needed to know who this person was and what was going on.

I asked for her boyfriend’s name and immediately looked him up. 

I couldn’t believe what I was reading.

He was a known drug dealer, had spent time in prison for drugs and violence and now was awaiting trial for holding up a garage at gunpoint. 

I had an armed gunman in my house. 

I moved swiftly into action. I completed eviction notices and alerted my existing tenants of the situation. Next, I phoned Lucy to say she and her boyfriend could no longer stay in the house and they had to find somewhere else to live. 

She replied that she didn’t know what I was talking about – that she wasn’t doing anything wrong and had nowhere else to go.

To create some urgency, I told them I would go to the house the following week, on a Thursday, to arrange their departure. 

In all honesty, I knew I couldn’t get them out this quickly, as a Section 21 eviction notice legally gave them two months to find another place to live. But I knew I had to do something, to put down a marker of how they should behave in my house. At the very least, I had to ensure they did not continue upsetting my other tenants.

By Thursday, I was ready to take them on.

When I reached the house, I saw four people positioned on each corner of the street, staring at me aggressively. This was a quiet suburban estate full of decent people – the glaring thugs were a clear indication they were ready for a ruck.

I had to show I wasn’t scared, so I parked my car, ignored the ‘bouncers’ and walked to the house.

I was met in the front hallway by a dramatically teary Lucy. ‘Please let us stay till we find somewhere else,’ she pleaded.

Unable to evict them immediately, I agreed to a date of departure that gave them one month to find somewhere else, although I doubted they would keep their word.

The whole time, Lucy’s boyfriend stood quietly watching our interaction. I could feel his eyes on me. 

‘No drugs and no disturbances please – I want you both to respect the others living here,’ I said directly to him.

He nodded without relaxing his stare. 

As I left the house, I felt proud of myself for facing up to these people. Yet once the adrenaline wore off, I was nervous of what was to come. 

Mostly, I was worried about the safety of the other tenants in the house, and what they would have to live with. Would they face the threat of violence? How were they going to suffer with these two in the house? 

On leaving, my first task was to locate rooms in my other houses, and in the houses of my landlord friends, to offer the five nurses accommodation elsewhere until the situation played out.

To their credit, the nurses told me that they trusted me to do what was necessary to get the house back to its peaceful state and decided to stay where they were.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, Lucy and her boyfriend ignored the one month deadline and over the next three months, there was a catalogue of misdemeanours.

I found out from a contact at the local homeless shelter that Lucy was engaging in sex work to raise money to buy drugs. Drug users continued to arrive at the house – one of whom had a bad reaction to a substance and covered the main bathroom in vomit and faeces. Two of the nurses in the house cleaned this themselves. 

They also reported that their door handles were being rattled in the middle of the night, leaving them afraid for their safety.

One weekend, the front door of the house was kicked in by people looking for payment on a drug debt and later, I had a phone call from neighbours informing me that two vicious dogs had arrived in the garden to ward off intruders. 

When I told the local police who was in my house, they almost high-fived me. They told me to keep the boyfriend there if possible, so they could keep tabs on his whereabouts. 

Then, three months on from our agreed departure date, during one of my twice-weekly visits to the house, I caught my unwanted tenants on a ‘down’ day. They had hacking coughs, gaunt faces and were persistently retching. 

It turned out they had no money and no drugs. What they said next both shocked and elated me.

The boyfriend asked if I would pay them to leave. Seizing my opportunity, we agreed on £300 – providing they left that instant. 

The room was still full of junk and so I asked what I was to do with it. ‘It’s all stolen’, he laughed in response, ‘so do what you want’. 

I immediately called a specialist cleaning company, who took an intensive week to clean the room. The police didn’t have the resources to examine all the remaining stolen goods and so my cleaners took them to the local hospital and charity shops.

In the eight years I have been a landlord since this happened, I count my blessings that I haven’t had a tenant like this. 

I believe I stood toe-to-toe with evil.

But out of the darkness comes the dawn, and after four months of waking up with cold sweats, worrying about what was happening to my house and whether my lovely tenants were safe, I most definitely felt stronger and more empowered through having stood up to these people. 

I had never before met totally immoral criminals whose thoughts each day revolved around taking from others to feed their destructive habits. 

I have undoubtedly grown more cautious about who I rent rooms to and am far more thorough in my vetting process, but I am emotionally stronger for having restored my house to good people.

This article was first published on Apr 28, 2024.

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