The righteous men

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The night of the first killing was filled with song. St Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan trembled to the sound of Handel's Messiah, the grand choral master that never failed to rouse even the most slumbering audience. Its swell of voices surged at the roof of the cathedral. It was as if they wanted to break out, to reach the very heavens.

Inside, close to the front, sat a father and son, the older man's eyes closed, moved as always by this, his favourite piece of music. The son's gaze alternated between the performers — the singers dressed in black, the conductor wildly waving his shock of greying hair — and the man at his side.

He liked looking at him, gauging his reactions; he liked being this close.

Tonight was a celebration. A month earlier Will Monroe Jr had landed the job he had dreamed of ever since he had come to America. Still only in his late twenties, he was now a reporter, on the fast track at The New York Times. Monroe Sr inhabited a different realm. He was a lawyer, one of the most accomplished of his generation, now serving as a federal judge on the second circuit of the US Court of Appeals. He liked to acknowledge achievement when he saw it and this young man at his side, whose boyhood he had all but missed, had reached a milestone. He found his son's hand and gave it a squeeze.

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