AN INQUEST was dramatically adjourned after a bereaved son revealed suspicions that somebody had helped his mother overdose.

Geoffrey Lyon said he thought that somebody had delivered a bottle of 100 paracetamol to the Countess of Chester Hospital where 76-year-old Dorothy Lyon died.

Deputy coroner for Cheshire Dr Janet Napier said: 'What you are saying is very serious. I have no choice but to adjourn the inquest so the matter can be investigated.'

Widow Mrs Lyon, of Parklands Drive, Elton, was taken into hospital a week before her death on October 20 last year and warned her son she would not be coming out.

Mr Lyon, a self-employed father-of-three from Manley View, Elton, did not visit his mum until Friday, October 18. He visited her again the following day.

While his mother left her bed, he looked into her handbag and found an empty bottle of paracetamol, which he said he had previously seen almost full in her house.

But the discovery was made too late and Mrs Lyon died in the early hours of the following morning.

Mr Lyon said: 'It is something that could never be proved. Those bottles had been in her house and then suddenly they were in her handbag.

'I would say that she asked for them and somebody had brought them to her. There are other people who had a key to her property.

His mother, a retired legal secretary, had never seemed the same since his father Alexander, an analytical chemist, died from leukaemia in 1996.

In February 2000, Mrs Lyon moved from her home on Lache Lane, Chester, to Elton to be near her son.

Mr Lyon said she seemed happy for a while, but added: 'She would call us in the middle of the night to say she was ill and was calling an ambulance.'

During one spell at hospital Mrs Lyon thought about moving to Thornton House nursing home. But when she went there, she changed her mind almost immediately and wanted to go.

Instead of returning to Elton, she told nursing staff she felt unwell and asked them to call for an ambulance.

She died a week later.