Deans looked at her for an age, trying to decide if that was good enough for him. In the end, he must have realised it was the best and only deal he was going to get.
‘There were four of us,’ he began reluctantly. ‘Myself, Laurence, Adam Mosson and Peter Bradley. We weren’t all best of pals. Laurence and I were pretty close and we got on well with Adam. Paddy was Adam’s mate and, to be honest, Laurence and I weren’t so keen on him. He was a bit of a loud mouth, a real chancer who was always banging on about how successful he was with the girls. Adam was a good guy, very different from Paddy, so we put up with his pal. Anyway, we went away for a weekend together.
‘It was always a bit of a daft idea. Staying in this bothy that Laurence had been to before near the Pass of Leny in the Trossachs. You know the sort of thing, a restored stone building — an old farmworker’s cottage I think this one was — that is left unlocked for shared use. It wasn’t exactly the season for it but Laurence was keen on all that outdoor stuff and he was insistent that it would be great.
‘The idea was just to get away from studying for a while, take a couple of bottles of whisky and some beer and do some hillwalking. We’d all been on teacher placement and it had been really hard going — or it seemed so at the time. What a lot of fuss we made then over nothing! We talked Adam into going and he invited Paddy along. I wasn’t too happy with that but Laurence was cool with it; he said the more the merrier. It would have been okay if the bad weather hadn’t kicked in. It was bloody freezing and Adam and Paddy were for pulling out. I mean, it got seriously cold. Minus eighteen degrees, so they said. Laurence talked them into it, though; accused them of being afraid of a wee bit of snow. So we went. Adam drove us in this battered old Volvo he’d got from his dad. We loaded it up with booze and headed to the Trossachs. The roads were terrible and it took us ages to get there. Then we had to walk the last half mile or so across six inches of snow to get to the bothy. It really wasn’t a great idea.
‘We got a good fire going inside but the wind was still blowing a gale under the door. After a few hours we’d just about had enough of the cold and decided to go to a pub so we could get some heat. We walked back to the car and Adam drove to the Lade Inn at Kilmahog. It was just what the doctor ordered: an open fire and large whiskies. And… well, that was where we met her.’
Deans let his head dip again, avoiding their eyes. Winter had the urge to grab Deans by the hair and yank his head back up to face them. But the man went on with his tale, despite continuing to stare at his chest.
‘She was in the pub, sitting on her own by the bar, chatting to the old boy behind the bar. She was good looking: long blonde hair tied back and a pretty face. She was only a little thing, barely over five foot, and we thought she was a couple of years younger than us. It was Paddy, of course, who went in first. He went straight up to her and started giving her this load of patter. It seemed to work, though, because next thing she was over at our table and we were all having a great laugh…’
Deans’ voice faltered, the mention of laughter sitting uneasily with the rest of his story. He lifted his head, staring sullenly at them.
‘She said she got called Barbie. We assumed it was a nickname because of her looks and, no, before you ask, she never mentioned a real name. She was English and said she was on a gap year before starting university and was bumming round Scotland. She came out with some hippy nonsense about trying to “find herself”. We all liked her; that was obvious. And she seemed to like being the centre of attention. She told us she was nearly skint so we bought her drinks all night.
She’d been going to stay in the pub overnight but Paddy talked her into coming back to share our place. She was all for it and… well, so were the rest of us. Adam hadn’t had as much to drink as the rest of us but he probably still shouldn’t have been driving. He did anyway and we all went back to the bothy. We had some more beers — a lot more. And…’
‘And?’ Narey demanded.
‘We had sex.’
‘We? You and Barbie?’
‘All of us. We all had sex with her.’
Deans let his head fall again but this time Narey wasn’t going to let him get away with it.
‘Look at me,’ she insisted. He did so but shamefaced, embarrassed rather than angry.
‘We all had sex with her,’ he repeated. ‘Paddy started it but then it… it just got out of hand. We were all drunk and it just happened. She wanted it. Let me be totally clear about that: she wanted it. If anything, she was the one who was in charge.’
Deans took a deep breath and let it back out in a heavy sigh, rubbing at his eyes and wincing at the resultant pain to the cut on his head.
‘In the morning… well, the morning wasn’t so good,’ he continued. ‘We were all a bit embarrassed. Not so much Barbie — she was a bit of a free spirit, I suppose — but the guys couldn’t really look each other in the eye. Even Paddy seemed uncomfortable. If anyone took it worse, it was Laurence. I think he really liked Barbie. I’d seen it in the pub on the Friday night; he was looking at her like a lost puppy. By the Saturday morning, he couldn’t look at her at all. In the afternoon, Paddy was back to his pain-in-the-arse normal self and he and Barbie were joking around like nothing had even happened. Laurence went off on his own, saying he was going into Kilmahog to bring back some food.
‘When he came back late in the afternoon, just after it had got dark, he was full of the news from the Lake of Menteith. He said everyone in Kilmahog was talking about how the lake was frozen and they were curling and skating on it. He said people were coming from all over the place to go on the ice. Laurence was up for going over there on the Sunday but the rest of us had already decided to go hiking over to Callander to see the Bracklinn Falls. Barbie, well, she saw how disappointed Laurence was and said that she’d go with him to the lake. I don’t think he knew how to react. He was still awkward about what had happened the night before but he couldn’t really say no.
‘We stayed at the bothy again that night and had plenty to drink but nowhere near as much as the night before. Everyone was edgy. Nothing happened. Well, I don’t think so anyway. Paddy and Barbie disappeared at one point, saying they were going to get more beer from the car. They were gone a while and I think the rest of us wondered what they were doing. I certainly saw the look on Laurence’s face. He wasn’t happy.
‘On the Sunday, Adam, me and Paddy headed off on foot and Laurence and Barbie hitched into Port of Menteith. I could see he still wasn’t too sure about it but they went anyway. It was the last time any of us saw Barbie. When we got back from Callander, Laurence was at the bothy, alone. He told us he’d had a big argument with Barbie and she’d gone off on her own. She’d had everything with her in her rucksack so she didn’t need to come back to the bothy to get anything. That was when Paddy dropped the bomb.’
‘What bomb?’
‘He said it was probably just as well that she was gone. She’d told him the night before she wasn’t on a gap year but that she’d run away from school. She was fifteen.’
Winter felt a sickening sensation somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach as his eyes flew to Narey, whose stare was fixed hard and angry on Deans. He, in turn, had found a spot on the floor that captured his attention.
‘Paddy thought it was funny but the rest of us certainly didn’t. Adam went for him and we had to pull him off. We were in deep shit. We were teachers, or training to be, and if it came out that… well, we’d never work. She was under age and that made us…’
‘Rapists?’ Narey offered. ‘Paedophiles?’
‘No!’
‘Legally there’s no doubt about it,’ she confirmed.