Broken boilers, damaged showers and missing keys: these are the familiar snags faced by buy-to-let landlords. But the phone call I received from the agent who manages my eight student flats in a Victorian conversion above a gastro-pub in Nottingham was totally unexpected.
Christopher Browne, Mail on Sunday – 18 May 2009
‘Hi, Chris. Something horrible has happened at the flats,’ he said. ‘One of your tenants has been murdered.’
Twenty-year-old student Matthew Pyke had been stabbed 86 times by David Heiss, a German, in an argument over a macabre internet computer game. Heiss was jailed for life last week after a threeweek trial in Nottingham.
I’m fairly thick-skinned but nothing prepares you for this. In 18 years of letting, the worst problem I’d ever had was when a couple who claimed to be accountants vanished to Greece owing two months’ rent. But a killing is a different matter altogether, as I was about to discover in a course of events that would end up costing me £4,000.
