with greying hair, a round face and glasses – but she looked nothing like them. Scarlett had long black hair, strange hazel-green eyes and the soft brown skin of a girl born in China, Hong Kong or some other part of Central Asia. She was slim and small with a dazzling smile that had got her out of trouble on many occasions. She wasn’t their real daughter. Everyone knew that. She had known it herself from the earliest age.
She had been adopted. Paul and Vanessa Adams were unable to have children of their own and they had found her in an orphanage in Jakarta. Nobody knew how she had got there. The identity of her birth mother was a mystery. Scarlett tried not to think about her past, where she had come from, but she often wondered what would have happened if the couple who had come all the way from London had chosen the baby in cot seven or nine rather than cot eight. Might she have ended up planting rice somewhere in Indonesia or sewing Nike trainers in some city sweatshop? It was enough to make her shudder… the thought alone.
Instead of which, she found herself living with her parents in a quiet street, just round the corner from North Dulwich station which was in turn about a fifteen-minute walk from her school. Her father, Paul Adams, specialized in international business law. Her mother, Vanessa, ran a holiday company that put together packages in China and the Far East. The two of them were so busy that they seldom had time for Scarlett – or indeed, for each other. From the time Scarlett had been five, they had employed a full-time housekeeper to look after all of them. Christina Murdoch was short, dark-haired and seemed to have no sense of humour at all. She had come to London from Glasgow and her father was a vicar. Apart from that, Scarlett knew little about her. The two of them got on well enough, but they had both agreed without actually saying it that they were never going to be friends.
One of the good things about living in Dulwich was that Scarlett did have plenty of friends and they all lived very nearby. There were two girls from her class in the same street and there was also a boy – Aidan Ravitch – just five minutes away. It was Aidan who had prompted her to cross the road.
Aidan was in his second year at The Hall, yet another local private school, and had come to London from Los Angeles. He was tall for his age and good-looking in a relaxed, awkward sort of way, with shaggy hair and slightly crumpled features. There was no uniform at his school and he wore the same hoodie, jeans and trainers day in day out. Aidan didn’t understand the English. He claimed to be completely mystified by such things as football, tea and Dr Who. English policemen in particular baffled him. “Why do they have to wear those stupid hats?” He was Scarlett’s closest friend, although both of them knew that Aidan’s father worked for an American bank and could be transferred back home any day. Meanwhile, they spent as much time together as they could.
The accident happened on a warm, summer afternoon. Scarlett was thirteen at the time.
It was a little after four and Scarlett was on her way home from school. The very fact that she was allowed to walk home on her own meant a lot to her. It was only on her last birthday that her parents had finally relented… until then, they had insisted that Mrs Murdoch should meet her at the school gates every day, even though there were far younger girls who were allowed to face the perils of Dulwich High Street without an armed escort. She had never been quite sure what they were so worried about. There was no chance of her getting lost. Her route took her past a flower shop, an organic grocer’s and a pub – The Crown and Greyhound – where she might spot a few old men, sitting in the sun with their lemonade shandies. There were no drug dealers, no child snatchers or crazed killers in the immediate area. And she was hardly on her own anyway. From half past three onwards, the streets were crowded with boys and girls streaming in every direction, on their way home.
She had reached the traffic lights on the other side of the village – where five roads met with shops on one side, a primary school on the other – when she noticed him. Aidan was on his own, listening to music. She could see the familiar white wires trailing down from his ears. He saw her, smiled, and called out her name. Without thinking, she began to walk towards him.
The van was being driven by a twenty-five-year-old delivery man called Michael Logue. He would have to give all his details to the police later on. He was delivering spare parts to a sewing machine factory in Bickley and, thanks to the London traffic, he was late. He was almost certainly speeding as he approached the junction. But on the other hand, the lights were definitely green.
Scarlett was about half-way across when she saw him and by that time it was far too late. She saw Aidan’s eyes widen in shock and that made her turn her head, wanting to know what it was that he had seen. She froze. The van was almost on top of her. She could see the driver, staring at her from behind the wheel, his face filled with horror, knowing what was about to happen, unable to do anything about it. The van seemed to be getting bigger and bigger as it drew closer. Even as she watched, it completely filled her vision.
And then everything happened at once.
Aidan shouted out. The driver frantically spun the wheel. The van tilted. And Scarlett found herself being thrown forward, out of the way, as something – or someone – smashed into her back with incredible force. She wanted to cry out but her breath caught in her throat and her knees buckled underneath her. Somewhere in her mind she was aware that a passer-by had leapt off the pavement and that he was trying to save her. His arm was around her waist, his shoulder and head pressed into the small of her back. But how had he managed to get to her so fast? Even if he had seen the van coming and sprinted towards her immediately, he surely wouldn’t have reached her in time. He seemed to know what was going to happen almost before it did.
The van shot past, missing her by inches. She actually felt the warm breeze slap her face and smelled the petrol fumes. There had been two books in her hand: a French dictionary and a maths exercise book… an hour and a half’s homework for the evening ahead. As she was carried forward, her hand and arm jerked, out of control, and the books were hurled into the air, landing on the road and sliding across the tarmac as if she had deliberately thrown them away. Scarlett followed them. With the man still grabbing hold of her, she came crashing down. There was a moment of sharp pain as she hit the ground and all the skin was taken off one knee. Behind her, there was the screech of tyres, a blast of a horn and then the ominous sound of metal hitting metal. A car alarm went off. Scarlett lay still.
For what felt like a whole minute, nobody did anything. It was as if someone had taken a photograph and framed it with a sign reading ACCIDENT IN DULWICH. Then Scarlett sat up and twisted round. The man who had saved her was lying stretched out in the road and she was only aware that he was Chinese, in his twenties, with black hair, and that he was wearing jeans and a loose-fitting jacket. She looked past him. The white van had swerved round a traffic island, mounted the pavement and smashed into a car parked in front of the primary school. It was this car’s alarm that had gone off. The driver of the van was slumped over the wheel, his head covered in broken glass.
She turned back. A crowd had already formed – perhaps it had been there from the start – and people were hurrying towards her, rushing past Aidan, who seemed to be rooted to the spot. He was shaking his head as if denying that he had been to blame. There were twenty or thirty school kids, some of them already taking photographs with their mobile phones. A policeman had appeared so quickly that he could have popped out of a trapdoor in the pavement. He was the first to reach Scarlett.
“Are you all right? Don’t try to move…”
Scarlett ignored him. She put out a hand for support and eased herself back onto her feet. Her knee was on fire and her shoulder felt as if it had been beaten with an iron club, but she was already fairly sure that she hadn’t been seriously hurt.
She looked at Aidan, then at the white van. A few people were already helping the driver out, laying him on the pavement. Steam was rising out of the crumpled bonnet. Next to her, the policeman was speaking urgently into his shoulder mike, doing all the stuff with Delta Bravo Oscar Charlie, summoning help.
Finally, Aidan made it over to her. “Scarl…?” That was his name for her. “Are you OK?”
She nodded, suddenly tearful without knowing why. Maybe it was just the shock, the knowledge of what could have been. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, noticing that her nails were grimy and all her knuckles were grazed. Her dress was torn. She realized she must look a wreck.
“You were nearly killed…!” Why was Aidan telling her that? She had more or less worked it out for herself.
Even so, his words reminded her of the man who had saved her. She looked down and was surprised to see that he was no longer there. For a moment she thought that it was a conjuring trick, that he had simply vanished into thin air. Then she saw him, already on the far side of the road – the side that she had been heading towards – hurrying past the shops. He reached a hair salon on the corner, where a woman with hair that was too blonde to be true had just come out. He pushed past her and then he was gone.
Why? He hadn’t even stayed long enough to be thanked.
After that, things unravelled more slowly. An ambulance arrived and although Scarlett didn’t need it, the van
