Well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs...
The Which? mag came out and I duly called my "Client" and she'd gone ahead and bought a Pentax for £299.
Had I been going to make a recommendation on the basis of the magazine, I might have suggested the Nikon Coolpix 885. It does 3M pixels and can be got for £340 odd on the web.
My bête noire when it comes to Digicams is "recycle"time. ie The time you have to wait after one shot before you can take the next. At high resolution, this can be as long as 16 seconds for the Goodmans or as short as 3.5 for the Fujifilm Finepix 601.
My first generation Olympus Camedia 1.4 is very slow but later Olympuses (Olympi?) allow two or three shots in quick succession - I'm led to believe. I've liked my Olympus these last three years and could be persuaded to go that route again. They have the reputation of having been the Digital Imaging leaders for some time.
Thanks for all suggestions and recommendations.