When I’d been in Kabul, children wandered between cars selling gum and phone cards, chanting ‘No mother, no father’. They chanted in English, beelining to the white SUVs of Western organisations, and I had begun to wonder if they even knew what it meant. No mother, no father. I still heard them, their small voices, especially in Croxley Green. I got a BMW chauffeur-driven from the Mandarin Oriental to St Pancras, where I walked through the station out to York Way and hailed a black cab.

Croxley was on the north-west edge of London, just inside the M25 but over the border of Hertfordshire. Its low suburban streets constricted around my heart. The historic windmill, the flat common, the interwar high street; a world without a horizon.

Even before she’d seen the house, Joanna had looked around and said: Do you think every life is a form of revenge?

Shops and pubs had closed, a new beauty parlour arrived. The public toilets, with their scrawled lists of times for cottaging, appeared to be open for business. The modern, red-brick church had a new notice board carrying photos of refugees.

I walked past my old secondary school where I had fallen in love with languages because they belonged to places utterly different from here. How benign that had seemed, to foster a relationship with places that were not yours. A love of history too, which also seemed to happen elsewhere, and was somewhere to which you might escape. I cleared some broken glass from the children’s playground, as an opportunity to check the road behind me. No one there except for a small boy on a bike, who yelled ‘Paedo’ and cycled off. I had been right at fourteen: this was the edge of the universe.

No one home. I went to the back, climbed into the garden, found the spare keys and let myself in. The place smelled of stale cigarette smoke and floor polish. Figurines crowded the window ledges. I thought of Christopher Bohren’s living room, up above Montreux, glass looking out over the Swiss town to Lake Geneva.

The bathroom was unchanged, the strip light harsh. I looked at my hands, the scar in the left palm where a woman extracted from the rubble of Baghdad’s police station had dug her nails through my skin. I lifted the blind. There were new locks on the windows, and what looked like traces of powder used by a forensics team.

I went back to the kitchen and sifted the post until I found one from Hertfordshire Constabulary regarding a break-in on 27 November, two days ago. It seemed a strange house to target.

I went to my old room. Books had been taken from the shelves and opened, a file of essays emptied out and hurriedly crammed back in.