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barely bothered with a coat this morning.’
    ‘Yer arse, Kenny,’ Dazza responded. ‘It’s freezing and they say it’s going to get a lot worse, eh? I read that there’s some big cold front coming over from Russia.’
    ‘Brilliant,’ Narey shivered. ‘So how cold does it have to get before the lake freezes? I’ve always fancied going over to Inchmahome if it does.’
    ‘Och, it needs to be like minus ten for a few weeks,’ Kenny told her. ‘It’s nowhere near that. Mind you, if it does freeze, then you should be careful about walking over to the island.’
    The man seemed to have timed his remark just as the barman walked by them to serve someone at the end of the bar nearest to the door. He threw a dirty look in Kenny’s direction, clearly having picked up on what he said.
    ‘Why should I be careful?’ Narey asked the two men. ‘What am I missing?’
    Kenny and Dazza exchanged supposedly cryptic smiles over her head.
    ‘Steady, Kenny,’ Dazza warned him in mock seriousness, raising his voice slightly. ‘You’re stepping on thin ice now.’
    Kenny sniggered, seemingly enjoying his pal’s joke. The barman didn’t seem quite so amused though, looking back at them suspiciously from the till.
    ‘Come on,’ Narey persisted. ‘What’s the joke?’
    ‘Oh, it’s no joke,’ Dazza said solemnly. ‘No joke at all. There was a deid body found on that island.’
    ‘What? When?’
    ‘Och, it was nearly twenty years ago now. You probably won’t remember it, young thing like you.’
    Narey swallowed down the answer she’d rather have given and instead smiled at the man, fluttering her eyelashes at the compliment.
    ‘So tell me then, what happened?’
    The two men glanced conspiratorially at each other, looking around as if making a show of checking no one else was listening – no one except the white-haired barman. They moved in closer on either side of Narey on the pretence of sharing a secret.
    ‘Well . . . it was the winter of ’93–’94,’ Dazza began, slightly louder than was necessary for any would-be conspirator. ‘A wee lassie, not all that much younger than you, was found battered to death on Inchmahome. Her heid was caved in. Terrible sight, so they say.’
    ‘She’d walked over the frozen lake, you see,’ Kenny took up the story. ‘Never made it back. Poor wee thing. Murdered in the old priory. Blood and broken bones everywhere.’
    Narey let a shudder visibly ripple through her, her shoulders shaking in a girlie manner sure to encourage them to continue their tale of gore.
    ‘So who was she?’ she asked, lowering her voice as if joining in on their intrigue.
    ‘No one knows,’ Kenny told her. ‘Never identified. Her face was bashed in so no one really knew what she looked like.’
    ‘Never found out who killed her either,’ Dazza added with a barely concealed grin. ‘He’s still out there somewhere.’
    Narey dutifully squirmed. She wasn’t the only one: the barman had his back half-turned to them but she saw him wringing the life out of a pint glass, rubbing at it with a towel as if trying to wipe the logo from it.
    ‘You hear all sorts,’ Kenny confided, leaning in towards Narey, clearly revelling in the story. ‘I was told it was one of them paedophile rings. Tried to kidnap her but it went wrong and they had to murder her.’
    ‘Nah,’ Dazza disagreed. ‘She was too old for that. I heard talk of her being a gypsy girl. There were definitely a good few Romany families who were in the area. The word is the deid girl was one of theirs and that’s why no one ever came forward.’
    ‘And what do you think of that?’
    ‘Could be,’ Kenny conceded. ‘Folk say how she was a Romany princess who had been determined to marry her lover, except that he wasn’t a gypsy and so her father killed her.’
    ‘Definitely,’ Dazza nodded enthusiastically. ‘I was talking to a bloke in here who was adamant that she was a gypsy girl. He said it was some other gyppo guy that