The day Noel Thomas was sentenced, Eira, his wife of 44 years, could not bear to come to court. Yet six years later she can still visualise her husband being led away from Caernarfon Crown Court in handcuffs, thanks to the billing the local paper gave the hearing. Its front page the next day told how the 59-year-old sub-postmaster, local councillor and grandfather, who had lived in the same small village on Anglesey for 30 years, had pleaded guilty to false accounting involving more than £48,000. As Thomas's brief, Wyn Lloyd Jones, told the court: "The defendant has lost his good name forever."