. . . old pipe maybe? Don’t know. It’s got kind of bust concretey edges. Definitely some sort of pipe.

Swimming beetles. Insects on the water. Pond skaters, Gerridae. And whirligigs. That’s another name I love. ‘Whirligigs.’ Quite a few. Don’t like my shadow, shy little things. Imagine breathing through your bum! Different types of waterweed. Gnats!

Gnats. What sort of gnats? Sylvicola? Macrocera?

There’s a pile of chunks stacked up. Look more soily than concretey, really. Does that make sense?

It’s clay. It’s a clay sewer pipe.

It is sort of dug down to. As if the ground has collapsed a bit.

The professor feels a kind of flutter in his centre. An expectation, that Ellie’s next few details will confirm the leap of imagination he’s not been able to prevent. That this ‘pipe’ is one of the many waterways they culverted, or co-opted as sewers, and built the growing city over, in the 1800s.

There’s big old flag iris to one side. The stalks all dried out. It’s in the sun. Nearly midday now.

Ellie, Ellie, tell me. Was the water running?

Oh! Hang on.

Even barely?

That’s. Wow! Yes! It’s a skin . . .

Exuvia . . .

It has the look of a shrunk dragon. A frail ferocity to its proportions. The heavy intent of its head. Its front two pairs of legs extended forward, as if it reaches out to claim something.

He places the cast skin on the plate of the field microscope. Focuses.

The mud of the pool bottom has dried upon the skeleton, an arid silt. He cannot help but think of ash. A rebirth. The body split, the soul escaped on wings.

There is something about the mud that gives the look of interruption. He recognises he is thinking of Pompeii. Perhaps because of Ellie’s mention of the Colosseum. Of people stopped mid-process.

Again, the scientist, he thinks of souls. Of a great heat vaporising the essence from a body.

The dorsal barbs, down to the penultimate section of the abdomen. The fact of the dried silt. He has pushed back the prospect. An intuition of its species he felt instantly.

But as he sees the skin, magnified, it speaks to him as an artefact. Seems utterly sure of itself. It is.

The barb on the ninth segment.

Libellula fulva. ‘Scarce Chaser’. Dragonfly. Unmistakable.

He looks to the date on the record he’s called up. The last recorded sighting. UK-wide. More than twenty years ago . . . On the drains of the Ouse Washes.

It’s on the Red List of protected species. As he thought it might be.

He gazes through the binocular field microscope.

It’s not the same, to him, to use the digital scopes. He was drawn to things. Things had given him wonder, and he was a scientist because of that, not for the need to understand. He tried to instil that in his students.