Yesterday a report damned her husband as one of the world's most prolific serial killers, but Primrose Shipman has stood by him. Nick Morrison looks at a woman in denial.

IT'S a fair bet that the television was not switched on last night in the small brick cottage, just yards from the A1. Nor will the newspaper boy have made the trip up the weed-strewn path to the peeling brown front door. Whatever else goes on inside those four walls, keeping up with the news is unlikely to be a priority, least of all over the last 24 hours.

While the world was struggling to grasp the enormity of the crimes of a man who has become notorious as one of history's most prolific serial killers, the woman who lives in the cottage has been struggling to avoid confronting the truth about her husband.

Primrose Shipman supported her husband throughout the 57 days of his trial. She refused to condemn him when the world stood appalled at his actions. She protested his innocence during her three hour grilling in last year's public inquiry. And there is no reason to think her beliefs will have been shaken by yesterday's publication of the inquiry report, which found that 215 people had fallen victim to the doctor's ministry of death.

The 54-year-old mother of four still makes the regular weekly hour-long trip from her home, near Wetherby just inside the West Yorkshire boundary, to Frankland Jail, on the outskirts of Durham, to visit her husband. Other than that, she is rarely seen outside her home, and her only visitors appear to be her children. She has shut herself away from the world, as if hoping that, if she forgets about it, it will forget about her.

Trying to escape from her unwanted notoriety has seen her move home three times since her husband's arrest in August 1998, first to Whitby in North Yorkshire, then to Hutton Ambo near York, where her father once worked, and then to the hamlet she now calls home.

But the enormity of her husband's crimes means the world will never forget. Ever since Harold Shipman's arrest, suspicions have been raised that his wife must have had an inkling of what he was up to. How can a man systematically murder his patients over a period of more than 20 years, and conceal it from the woman who shares his bed?

And now his victims have been found to number not 15 - the deaths he was convicted of causing at his trial more than two-and-a-half years ago - but more than ten times that number, those suspicions have grown louder and more insistent, suspicions which Primrose Shipman's behaviour at the inquiry did nothing to dispel.

Confronted with a series of occasions when she was said to have been present at or around the time her husband killed his patients, Primrose could only say she had "no recollection" of the events.

She had no recollection of the deaths of two 74-year-old women in Hyde, when she was she was said to have accompanied her husband to their homes. She had no recollection of an incident at the GP's former practice in Todmorden when a patient almost died. She had no recollection of the occasion when a young woman given an injection by Shipman at her home awoke to find the doctor and his wife in the room. She had no recollection of the time she was asked to stay with the body of a deceased patient while her husband went on another call.

Even for the wife of a GP, when death must be a regular occurrence even without the doctor's helping hand, the likelihood that not one of these events stuck in the memory seemed to stretch credulity to the limit.

But this selective memory failure is by no means unusual, when the alternative is confronting the possibility that a loved one has done something too horrendous to contemplate, according to Dr Joan Harvey, chartered psychologist at Newcastle University.

"The Freudian word would be 'repression', when things are really, really painful to remember. We don't consciously get amnesia or forget things that are distasteful, but in her position that could be a defence mechanism," says Dr Harvey.

"That is almost certainly what she has done, because to confront what she is otherwise forced to confront is so incredibly awful. If you have been living with somebody, to realise that they have been doing this for more than 25 years, and to actually grasp that fact, psychologically it must be nearly impossible.

"And, although we will not know unless she tells us, I would suspect that she probably didn't know what was happening. He was highly qualified and a medical practitioner, and she would have had no reason to believe these deaths were suspicious."

Although she is said to see little of her eldest child and only daughter, Sarah, 35, Primrose is thought to be in regular contact with sons Christopher, 31, David, 23, and a student at Newcastle University, and Sam, 20.

While her instinct may have been to protect her children from reports of their father's crimes, they will have been grappling with their own turmoil over the killings. And the only solution may be to believe their father was suffering from a mental illness at the time, says Dr Harvey.

"Psychologically, you can't live with that knowledge, so you have got to find some way of reconciling that so you can cope with it. You can either think that what he has done is horrible and try and put some psychological distance between it, or you can turn it on its head and say you don't believe he could have done that.

"But that becomes harder when the system is clamping down on him, and in the end it can become impossible to maintain. The more sensible psychological solution is to put some distance between you and try and understand that there was something wrong with him.

"If they know that he had been some sort of psychopath, and that those psychopathic tendencies were not inherited, which must have been a worry, they can come to terms with it more readily than not knowing why he has done what he has done," says Dr Harvey.

Much has been made of Shipman's apparent domination of his family - he is said to have had a controlling influence over both his wife and his children - but Dr Harvey says this is unlikely to have played a significant role in how they viewed him. His position as a GP, a respected member of the community, would have been enough in itself to make them look up to him.

But while his children may no longer be in awe of their father, Primrose Shipman has clung on to the conviction that her husband is innocent. It is a conviction that is now one of the few constants in her life, and is unlikely to have been affected by yesterday's report. For, virtually isolated from the world as she is, if she loses that faith, what has she left?