Libby’s daughter Belinda met them for lunch, but Fran could not be persuaded to invite her own daughter Lucy. ‘She’d whine about bringing the children and then try and insist I went out to Tulse Hill to see them instead,’ she said. ‘I can do without that.’ On Sunday the weather went back to being late spring-like and stayed like it for the next few days. Adam went back to work at Creekmarsh, Mog joined him for a few hours a day and Lewis and Katie apparently stayed in London. Adam reported that no police had been seen and everything seemed to have returned to normal. Ben and Libby had another look round Steeple Farm and decided that Lewis’s interest had been fleeting and born of the circumstances at the time. They would have to go it alone. Luckily, Mog had contacts with reliable local builders, one of whom was a qualified lime plasterer and had been employed by English Heritage on restoration work in the area. He was able to make a start on the odd bits of refurbishment that would be needed, but before that Libby and Ben had to decide what extremities of bad taste would have to be ripped out.
