'Not the same.'

'Not quite, perhaps. But you spoke of the psychology of killing. Gregory didn't just send terminally ill people to sleep with morphine. He told me that he had killed several severely handicapped children and a man whom he regarded as dangerously insane.'

In a sense she was arguing against herself-if what she said was true then Heysen had the capacity to kill. But her point about him not delegating carried some weight. She saw that I was considering it and followed up.

'The other thing is this-think of how easy it would have been for Gregory to kill Peter himself if he'd wanted to. The drugs available to him…'

'They must have considered that in the investigation. What about at the trial?'

She gathered up the photographs, looking at them as if she'd never seen them before. She moved the photograph of her son closer to me across the table. 'His legal team was incompetent. The prosecution painted Gregory as a coward, unable to do his own dirty work. Of course, Gregory wasn't able to provide support for the idea that he could! This was twenty-three years ago, and you know how things stand with euthanasia even now.'

'Yes. How did they get the idea that he was a coward?'

Again, her smile had a bitter edge. 'Mr Hardy, my husband, as Frank must have told you, was a very dislike-able man.'

'In what way?'

'He was arrogant and conceited in all his dealings with people outside the practice. He treated people he regarded as his intellectual and social inferiors with contempt. And that was almost everyone. He rubbed everybody up the wrong way-the police, lawyers, the judge, the jurors-and it was his undoing.'

'He doesn't sound like a man you'd marry.'

She shrugged. 'Like Frank, he was manly. The fashion business is full of effeminates and pansies.'

Perhaps they were well suited, sharing at least one prejudice.