It was one in the morning and he had been on a round trip, via Ealing, to see his grandparents’ old house. He had set it on fire before leaving the UK a year before and it was boarded up, standing like a blackened, rotten tooth in an otherwise perfect mouth. He was still technically the legal owner but there was no chance of his ever being able to reclaim it. No doubt the council would eventually take possession. Sitting outside in the road, looking up at it and remembering the events that had led up to his escape abroad, he had felt extraordinarily detached. The thirty-plus years he had endured there, both with his grandparents and then after their deaths on his own, along with the final, absurdly dramatic denouement, meant nothing. He was dead to it all and everything it represented. It was as though the house embodied somebody else’s foul history rather than his own. Checking that there was nobody around, he got out of the car and locked it.
