“Well, it’s not really work. Pleasure, really. I’m personal assistant to Brian Barnes of Squirrel Development. We’re entertaining some clients at Rashwood Hall.”

She giggled smugly. George wished her a pleasant evening and said he hoped Mr. Barnes appreciated her, then replaced the receiver. He went back over the road, then to the pub for a drink. He told himself that it was because he needed change for the other phone calls he still had to make, but it was more like a celebration.

Chapter Nine

When George approached the entrance to the Squirrel leisure complex, he realised he had been to Rashwood Park once before. His son had been a student at Bristol University, and he and Molly had come to know the city well during his time there. They had visited Rashwood Park when they spent a weekend with him before taking him home for the summer vacation. There had been an end-of-term party, a picnic lunch, and George and Molly had been invited. It had all been rather posey and pretentious—there were girls wearing Victorian underwear, with flowers in their hair, and young men with loud voices discussing art. Molly had hated it and muttered throughout the festivity about privilege and decadence. He had found it amusing. Both had agreed that the setting for the picnic was spectacular and had encouraged extravagant posturing.

They had driven out of the city and down the narrow country roads to the grounds of a ruined Georgian mansion which were apparently open to the public. It was a magnificent lush crumbling place with ivy-covered pillars, the empty stone bowls of giant fountains, and broken statues overgrown with honeysuckle and convolvulus. Below the houses there had been a lake with flag iris at its edge and a forest of bramble and beech beyond, and on the low ground between the lake and the house a meadow of wildflowers and long grasses. George seemed to remember that they all drank too much wine, and one of the nymphlike girls spoilt the image of purity by being sick.

Now everything was quite different. The old mansion had been demolished. Nothing was left of the pillars and towering arches, though there were mean little arches in brick leading from the bar of the new hotel to a patio of bright pink stone. And there, in a corner, cleaned and scrubbed, was one of the statues from the old garden. The grass was nitrate-green and was being mowed again—quite unnecessarily it seemed to George—by a man sitting on a noisy machine.

The developer had retained the lake, but now it had concrete sides to allow easy access for the wind surfers, and it was surrounded by a complex of self-catering houses which varied in architectural style from Mediterranean villas to Swiss chalets. The meadow had been drained to form part of the golf course.

When George made a phone call from Pemberton to Gwen Pullen, the curator of the museum, to ask her to dinner at Rashwood Park, she had been horrified.