“My goodness, that’s a hard one. I mean, I wouldn’t know where to begin. He was a good man, certainly, quick to laugh, but serious when need be. He had gravitas. He was also considerate, attentive, loving. He listened. So many people I find these days just like to talk endlessly about themselves. You know the kind. While you’re talking you can tell they’re just thinking about what they’re going to say next. But Tony was a genuine listener. He was funny, too, he could make me laugh. He liked to experiment, try new things, but I think at heart he was a traditionalist, a family man. It was as much the times we were living in as anything. We were thinking of starting a family, you know, when . . . when it happened.”

“Would you say Tony was a weak man?”

“No, I wouldn’t say weak. He was certainly impressionable, suggestible, perhaps easily led. But he knew where to draw the lines. He had a moral compass, fiber, whatever you call it. He was honest, even if it was at his own cost. He was certainly capable of standing up for what he believed was right.”

Something had clearly gone askew with Tony Monaghan’s moral compass, Banks thought, if what Linda Palmer had told him was true. And he believed her. Why would she lie? The thing was that perhaps a man like Monaghan, the way his widow described him, might in a mad moment lose his direction in order to try a new experience, perhaps be led astray by someone else’s charisma, as she had said. And if Tony Monaghan was half the man she said he was, if he did lose his way, it would torment him. And if that torment made itself known to, say, Caxton, and appeared to threaten him in any way . . . Caxton was a powerful and charismatic man.

“How long did you live in London?” Banks asked.

“I was born there. Cricklewood. I left in my early thirties. That was five years after Tony died. He was twenty-seven when he was killed.

“How long had you been married?”

“Five years. I know it seems very young, but people did things like that back then. He’d just come out of university and was starting in the advertising business, and I’d graduated from secretarial college. I mostly temped until Tony started making enough to live on. We were so happy. It’s hard to believe in all the optimism of youth these days. Everything seems so bleak and futureless. But despite the bomb and Kennedy’s assassination and all the rest of the terrible things that went on, there was hope. It was somehow more palpable then. Or am I looking back through rose-colored glasses the way I’m looking at Lindisfarne now? Life must have been tough there back in the eighth century.” A gust of wind ruffled her curls.