We'd known each other since we'd used to crawl around on the same carpets together, but I couldn't remember seeing her in anything else but jeans. Yet there were her legs all right; pretty good-looking ones too, under a knee-length black skirt. She wore a big naval-looking jacket with the cuffs turned over, and black gloves; medium-high heels made her the same height as me.

She grinned. "Short memory, Prentice. Recall school?"

"Oh, yeah," I nodded, still looking at the legs. "Apart from then, though." I shrugged, smiled warily at her. I'd gone through a protracted Unbearable stage while I'd been at high school — it had lasted from my first day through to about fourth year — and the most vivid memory I had of Ash from that time was when I and her two brothers had carried out a highly successful snowball ambush on her, her sister and their pals as they'd walked back from school one dark evening. Somebody's snowball had broken that long sharp nose of Ashley's, and I suspected it had been one of mine if for no other reason than because as far as I knew nobody else had been deploying snowballs whose ballistic properties had been enhanced by the judicious reinforcement of their cores with moderately sizeable chuckie stones.

Her nose had been reset, of course, and we'd got on better since we'd each left school. Ash frowned a little, her slightly magnified grey eyes searching mine.

"I was sorry to hear about the old lady. All of us were." She swivelled briefly to Dean, standing lighting up a Regal behind her. He nodded; black jeans and a dark blue crombie that looked like it had seen better decades.

I wasn't sure what to say. "I'll miss her," I said eventually. I'd been trying not to think about it, ever since I'd heard the news.

"Was it a heart attack, aye, Prentice?" Dean inquired through his cloud of smoke,

"No," I said. "She fell off a ladder."