Page 5 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
‘Golf, eh? Good old Rob.’
‘He’s under a lot of pressure, Stef. He needs to relax sometimes.’
Stef concentrated on the sorbet but sensed her mother’s eyes on her. Rob got away with murder. Quite how she and her younger sister had grown up to be such different people she didn’t know. Stef had been biddable and hardworking as a teenager. Pippa, at fifteen, once she’d made herself up to look old enough, had started going to clubs in Cambridge with fake ID and coming home at all hours. She’d managed to scrape a Business HND at a further education college, and afterwards had done a series of administrative jobs locally until she’d met Rob, who regularly visited Cambridge on business. They’d moved to Norwich because property was cheaper. And that had been that. Pippa seemed perfectly happy being a stay-at-home wife, supporting her wage-earner husband – at least on the surface. And the twins, Jack and Jess, were undeniably sweet when they weren’t fighting. Stef thought Rob affable but dull, and privately thought he did the minimum when it came to fatherhood. He certainly wasn’t her idea of a desirable partner.
‘At least he works hard,’ her mum said. ‘Bringing home the bacon.’
‘That is true,’ Stef remarked, scooping up the last traces of sorbet. She piled the bowls, rising from the table. ‘I’ll wash up.’
‘Oh, leave it. I’d like another cup of tea.’
‘What about the shopping for tomorrow?’
‘All in good time.’
Stef took her tea out to the front and walked a few yards up the lane until she reached the sweet spot where her phone began to ping as a couple of text messages landed. One was from Pippa telling her about coming in the morning, the other from her phone company advising her that her bill was ready. When she looked at her emails, one in particular stood out. It was from Sarah, replying to Stef’s own message.‘Fascinated to hear what you’ve found about Nancy’s missing thesis. I think you’re seriously on to something here.’Stef smiled to herself. She thought so, too.
Four
Just before six that evening, although the June heat was fading, Stef and her mum set out for Nancy’s talk at the nature reserve in bright sunshine, Stef guiding her car carefully between potholes in the narrow lane. At one point, a boat on a trailer turned out of a track signposted ‘To the Staithe’ and she had to reverse into a layby to let it pass.
The visitors’ centre at the reserve, half a mile further on, was a low, modern building that had been designed to blend in with the landscape. Stef could hardly pick it out at first. When they drew close, she saw that its roof was studded with succulents, moss and gently waving grasses. ‘Like a Hobbit house,’ she commented, laughing.
She turned into a gritted car park area that was already full of cars. The people climbing out of them were mostly of retirement age or families, though there were a couple of youngish hikers laden with rucksacks and binoculars.
‘Quite a crowd,’ Cara remarked as Stef locked the car. ‘Nancy should be pleased.’
Inside, Stef bought tickets at the shop counter from an unsmiling man with ‘Josh, Wildlife Officer’ printed on his name badge, then they walked through into a large room with picture windows looking out onto the reserve. Chairs had been laid out in rows before a portable white projector screen.
‘There she is!’ Cara pointed. Stef glanced across eagerly.
At a small table next to the screen, a stylish elderly lady sat close to a young man wearing a navy linen jacket over a pale blue polo shirt. Their heads were bent over an open laptop. Stef only had the opportunity to note Nancy’s swept-up silver hair and floaty pink neck scarf before her mother drew her to a pair of empty seats halfway down the rows, next to the aisle, and her view of Nancy was blocked by a large gentleman in a birdwatcher’s cloth hat.
Cara proceeded to point out various people in the room. Stef was impressed by how many she’d already got to know since moving to the village. The woman she waved to behind them had two boys with her of nine or ten. ‘They go to the primary school near the church,’ she whispered, before indicating an older man further along their row with a soldierly bearing who she said delivered the parish magazine, worked with boats at the staithe and kept bees. Stef, in the meantime, was beguiled by a girl of six or seven dressed in trackpants and a T-shirt with a rainbow decoration who was skipping up and down the aisle. She clutched a pack of picture cards and was singing to herself. When Stef smiled at her, she smiledback briefly before resuming her game. She had long, almost black straight hair and striking dark features.
‘Who’s she?’ she asked her mother, who shook her head.
The answer presented itself when the man named Josh, who’d sold them their tickets, arrived at the front and tested the microphone on the lectern. The child darted over to the pair at the laptop and whispered something to the man in the polo shirt before taking a seat in the first row. A strange feeling came over Stef as she watched, but there was no time to identify the cause, for Nancy Foster was walking across to stand beside Josh. Although she looked frail, she held herself upright and her movements were graceful. She conveyed quite a presence, Stef thought.
‘We are delighted to welcome Dr Nancy Foster,’ Josh began in a confident voice. ‘She’s here to tell us about the life cycle of the swallowtail butterfly. As you know, this Broad is one of the very few places in the country where this rare insect can be seen. Some of us here had a wonderful time with Nancy this afternoon, didn’t we, trying to spot some around the reserve? And it being fantastic weather, they were out and about and we were lucky to see one or two. Nancy, over to you.’
‘Thank you, Josh.’ Nancy’s eyes brightened as she took her place behind the lectern and began to speak. ‘Good evening, everybody, and thank you for coming.’ She had a low, musical voice and Stef agreed with her mother about the distinctive way she dressed. The soft pinks and greys of her scarf went with her pale skin tones and brought out the grey-blue of her irises, a colour so light her eyes were mesmerizing. Herdress, too, was grey, but below the waist the grey gave way to patches of colourful pastels that ran up from the hem, reds and pale blues, like watercolours running in the rain. For a moment, Stef was too intent on the woman’s appearance to listen to what she was saying, but now the first slide clicked up on the screen – a close-up photograph of the rare butterfly – and she began to concentrate on the lecture.
‘Butterflies are my favourite insect and British swallowtails are my favourite type of butterfly. I love their unusual shape, with these tiny horns at the base of their wings like a swallow’s tail – hence their name – and the intricate patterns on their wings. And their rarity does give them an extra-special glamour. We must take care of our swallowtails. Here on the Broad…’
With the help of drawings and photographs which the man on the laptop clicked onto the screen at her behest, Nancy explained how the creature lived and reproduced, and why the Broad was one of the few places providing the exact conditions for it to thrive. In particular, swallowtails laid their eggs on milk parsley, which is what the caterpillars ate when they hatched. Its flower head, like the more common cow parsley that filled the hedgerows in May, was shaped like an umbrella and consisted of a mass of tiny umbrellas, each one made up of minute flowers.
Stef found the talk fascinating. She didn’t remember ever going into such detail at school about the complex relationship of insects to their environment and was alarmed by the fragility of it. Take away one of the balance of elements that these tiny, delicate creatures needed to live – something assimple as milk parsley – and the butterfly could not survive. Other types of parsley simply would not do.
Throughout the talk, focused as she was on Nancy and her slides, Stef was also aware of the little girl at the front. The child sat quietly, swinging her legs, but once she dropped several of her playing cards on the floor of the aisle and slipped down from her seat to collect them up.
After the talk, Nancy answered several questions from the audience and then, in her closing words, came the surprise.
‘I would like to thank my grandson Aaron for managing the technical side’.
Aaron. Stef straightened then and, with a returning sense of disquiet, rose briefly to look over people’s heads at the man operating the laptop. He raised his head and was instantly recognizable. It was Aaron the film-maker whose crew had parked in front of her mother’s house on moving day. He was Nancy’s grandson? She sank back down, recalling how unfriendly she’d been to him, and blushed with embarrassment.
‘Stef, are you all right?’ Her mother’s nudging elbow startled her. She managed to nod.
