By the time we got down into the village we could hear a clock somewhere striking midnight. It pealed through the cold, clear night air, like a bell ringing for the dead, sonorous and deep and filled with a dreadful prescience. The hike up Bell’s Brae in the dark, past the silent mews houses, was slow and treacherous. Snow had fallen, then melted where the sun had touched it, then frozen. By the time we reached Kirkbrae House at the top of the hill we were, all three of us, sweating from the effort. They had told us at school that the turreted and step-gabled Kirkbrae House, half of which disappeared down below the bridge, had been a tavern in the seventeenth century. I’d have given anything right then for a glass of the fine fizzing ale they had drunk back in those days. Something to stop my tongue from sticking to the roof of my mouth, and restore the courage I felt deserting me as the bridge approached.

The Kelly boys were waiting for us where the first arch of the bridge began, huddled in the shadow of Kirkbrae House. The town was deserted and as silent as Dean Cemetery. There wasn’t a car on the road, or a light in any of the windows of the stone terraces that marched up Queensferry Street towards the west-end. But the moon reflected off every snow-covered surface of the village below. Only the black waters of the river itself were completely lost in darkness.

“You’re late!” Patrick Kelly hissed from the shadows. “We’ve been waiting here for ages. And it’s fucking freezing!”

I could hear him stamping and clapping his gloved hands together, trying to keep warm, and I wished I had gloves, too.

“Well, we’re here now,” I said. “And we might as well get started. Me first.” I moved towards the parapet, but felt Patrick’s big open hand pushing into my chest.

“No. Me first. I’ve been hanging around here long enough. Who’s going to time it?”

“I am.” Catherine stepped forward into the pale yellow glow of an electric street lamp and opened her hand to reveal an engraved silver stopwatch with a pink ribbon attached to it.

One of the other Kelly boys grabbed her wrist to get a better look, and you could hear the envy in his voice. “Where’d you steal that?”

Catherine pulled her wrist free and closed protective fingers around it again. “I didn’t steal it. My dad gave me it.”

Patrick said, “Okay, Danny, you check she disnae cheat.” And he reached up to grasp the wrought-iron spikes that ran along the curve of the parapet, to pull himself up and over, feet sliding and scraping on the ice, till he had lowered himself down to the ledge below.