“He came into the museum occasionally before his trips to exotic places, trying to get information about the birds he might see there. He could be an awful nuisance, but I rather liked him.” She looked around her and said, “ Whatever possessed you to stay in a dreadful place like this? You’d be more comfortable on the sofa in my flat.”

He shrugged and waited until the waiter had deposited tepid soup in front of them.

“It might have a bearing on Greg Franks’ death,” he said. “How on earth did they get planning permission?”

“George,” she said roguishly, “ I do believe you’re changing the subject.”

“No,” he said. “ Really. It might be important.”

“We’re all supposed to be attracting tourism,” she said. “The service industry, I believe they call it. It’s the same at the museum. There’s no money for any real research anymore. No money for paying reputable biologists. The whole place is staffed now by starving young graduates on some government scheme. They’re very pleasant children, and they try their best, but as soon as we’ve trained them up, they come to the end of their contract and have to move on. Yet we do seem to have money for a new restaurant, where the food is actually almost as disgusting as in here, and we do seem to have money to renovate the shop so we can sell toy dinosaurs and lousy tea towels. That apparently is what the public wants, so that’s the service we have to provide.”

He waited until she had run out of breath. He knew better than to stop her in midflow.

“So the council bent the planning rules because they think Rashwood Park will attract tourists?” he said.

“No,” she said. “ No, I don’t actually think any rules were bent. Rashwood isn’t in the greenbelt. It isn’t a site of special scientific interest. Some of the botanists at the museum were muttering that it should have been. They claimed some rare plant or other. But there was no evidence. It was all anecdotal. And when Duncan James came to do his survey, he didn’t find anything, so there were no grounds to prevent the planning application’s going ahead.”

“I only came here once before it was ruined,” he said, “but I thought the woodland looked very good, and that the lake might attract some wildfowl. Didn’t any of the local birdwatchers come here? They might have found something to give it the status of a site of special scientific interest.”

“The only person I knew to cover it all,” she said, “was your friend Greg Franks. And that was a long time ago. Before he started this twitching business.”