ALICE Grant had been a quiet, hard-working, house-proud mother who devoted her life to her three children.

The contrast between the 84-year-old and the woman who killed her, a woman repeatedly accused in court of laziness, lying and callousness, could not have been more marked.

Alison Firth, a mother of a four-year-old girl who was yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment, lived in the quiet Newcastle cul-de-sac of Huntingdon Close in Kingston Park.

But she had a record of negligence which went back far beyond her employment at Aidan House, in Gateshead.

Firth had secured at least 27 posts in her 16-year career, and a reputation for being unprofessional followed her wherever she went.

Detectives revealed that Firth's relatives had written her references, she had repeatedly lied to cover absenteeism and lateness, and had even made up stories of having been raped in order to justify time off work.

In 1998 she was cautioned by Northumbria Police for falsifying time sheets while working as an agency nurse in Newcastle.

Police found that the charges of laziness followed her from her first job at Crosshouse NHS Hospital, Kilmarnock, in her native Scotland in 1988, to subsequent posts in Tyneside, Northumberland, Harrogate, Hemel Hempstead, in Hertfordshire, and Ayrshire, Scotland.

The investigating officer, Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Napier, said: "She was an accomplished liar. She would change her behaviour according to who was questioning her. She would swing from being quiet and timid to overbearing."

After her arrest, she complained that her home had been attacked and attempted to gain credence with police. She claimed a coffin-shaped card, with a picture of her and her daughter stuck to it, was placed on her windscreen, that hate mail had arrived in the post, and that a quilt was set on fire outside her back door.

Police set up closed-circuit television outside her home, and established that concrete had indeed been thrown through the family's lounge window as she sat in the room with her husband. They dismissed the rest of the claims as fabrication.

The owner of the Manor Care Home Group, which ran Aidan House, is Tyneside comedian Bobby Pattinson. He said he was "devastated" by the accusation against Firth, but added that the home had seen two references, checked her record and abided by the rules.

A Gateshead and South Tyneside Health Authority spokesman said that at the time Firth was employed it was its responsibility to ensure that procedures were in place to check nurses.

These guidelines were followed, but the references did not have to be checked. A Government body is now working on a new set of national guidelines. It seems Firth's ability to lie and manipulate outweighed any checks the system could provide.