Читать книгу Deadly Divorces - Tammy Cohen - Страница 6

Some days Rena Salmon could not believe her luck. Some days she would gaze around her £400,000 home in the affluent Berkshire village of Great Shefford, listening to her son and daughter laughing with their school friends in a different part of the house, and she’d wonder yet again how on earth she’d managed to end up there.

Great Shefford is prime commuter belt territory; near to Reading and Newbury, and not too far from London itself. Its picturesque cottages, good schools and country air make it a magnet for stockbrokers, solicitors and anyone else who dreams of a rural-style life with all city amenities close by – oh, and who can afford the hefty price-tag that property there commands. Luckily money wasn’t a problem for Rena because her husband Paul made a fortune as an IT consultant. Rena got to swan around in a fancy Merc and to take holidays at their seaside home in Dorset with its own private section of beach. Not bad for a woman who’d run away from home at the age of 13 and had spent most of her teenage years in Care. No wonder she sometimes had to give herself a good hard pinch to make sure this was actually real.

Born in Birmingham on 20 February 1960, Rena Beyum Uddin had not had the easiest of starts. Depending on who you talked to, you’d get a slightly different version of what childhood was like in the Uddin household, but let’s just say none of the accounts would put you in mind of the Waltons. The story Rena and her sister Sabeya told was that their mother had been a prostitute; first in Birmingham and then Burnley. Growing up, they said, the house had been full of dirty old men, all clients of their mother’s. Both Rena and Sabeya had dark skin, apparently a legacy of their different Asian fathers. This physical characteristic was a constant source of irritation to their mother, claimed the women, and she’d regularly scrub them roughly with a mixture of bleach and scouring powder to lighten their skin and referred to them as ‘black bastards’.

Imagine what such a childhood would do to an impressionable young girl. Consider the daily beatings your ego and sense of self would sustain. Think how you’d shrivel inside and start hating your reflection in the mirror; imagine how you’d come to believe that no one would ever love you, that you’d never be worthy of respect or affection. Picture how little hope you’d hold out of ever getting away from that situation, of ever being allowed anything ‘better’.

Living in a series of foster homes and children’s homes from the age of 13 hadn’t done much either for Rena’s fragile self-esteem. What message does that background send to a girl whose faith in people is already so tarnished? That nothing is permanent, what appears to be security can be whisked away at a moment’s notice, that it’s a cruel world and you have to hang onto what’s yours because there’s always someone else behind you waiting to snatch it away, leaving you with nothing.

But Rena’s luck – or rather the lack of it – changed when she joined the Army. Here finally was her opportunity to belong to a group; almost a ‘family’ that would always take care of her in the way her real family had failed to do. After so many years of feeling like she didn’t have the right clothes, of always sensing she was second best, Rena was proud to put on smart uniform everyday, finally to fit in.

She trained as a Data Telecoms Operator and in 1980 was posted to Northern Ireland. For many servicemen and women being sent to a place where hostility and tension seemed to hang heavy in the grey skies overhead would have constituted a nightmare posting, but for Rena it was the start of a dream life because it was here that she first met Paul Salmon. Paul was a technician with the Royal Signals. With his clear, sparkling eyes, curly brown hair and easy charm, he was the kind of man Rena Salmon had never imagined might actually be interested in her. But over time, the two struck up a friendship that deepened into romance.

There was only one slight blot on the pages of this fairy tale – Paul was already married. However, he wasn’t going to let a little thing like that get in the way of a blossoming love affair. He set about getting divorced and in 1985 he and Rena tied the knot. For the girl who’d always felt unloved and unwanted; who’d been brought up to think she wasn’t good enough, it was a day she thought she’d never see. At last she had found someone who loved her for who she was and didn’t want to change her. After taking her vows, she silently added a couple of her own: that she would love this man forever and she would never let anything come between them.

Every new bride experiences that thrill of being reborn – of feeling as if she is starting out on a new life with the man she loves. For Rena Salmon, this sensation was even stronger than most. Her old life had been one of hardship and neglect. She wanted to put it far behind her. This new life was the real life where the true Rena would have a chance to come forward, shine and grow. And it was all down to Paul. With him by her side, at last she could find the happiness and security that had always eluded her.

When her son was born in 1989 and followed by a daughter in 1992, Rena’s fairy tale seemed complete. She threw herself into being a perfect mum, showering on her own children the love and affection she herself had been denied. Everything she’d always thought lacking in herself, she now invested in her children. They would have the childhood she’d only ever seen in films – the meals out, the trips to the cinema, the family dinners. Gazing down at their sleeping bodies, she promised herself they would never come to harm and that as long as she lived she’d strive to give them the stability children so desperately need.

While Rena was delighted with the emotional riches married life had given her, it also didn’t hurt that materially she now had everything she could wish for. In civilian life Paul had found a niche as a high earning IT consultant and within a short time he was earning over £80,000 a year. Rena too started working full time two years after her daughter’s birth. For the first time in her life she didn’t want for anything: she had beautiful clothes and expensive cars; she went on shopping sprees to New York and took pleasure in buying herself nice things. Finally she was starting to let herself believe that she was worth it.

In 1998 the Salmons moved to the Great Shefford house. Rena was in her element, buying things for the house, creating the home she’d never had. She started to make friends in the neighbourhood; mostly women she met while dropping off or picking up her kids from school. One of these new friends was Lorna Rodrigues.

Although Lorna was seven years younger, the two just seemed to click. Lorna was energetic and fun to be around, the perfect pick-me-up for the more reserved older woman. Also, being married to a mixed-race Australian meant that Lorna was more multi-culturally aware than most of the people in this predominantly white middle-class town.

Lorna ran a successful beauty salon in Chiswick, west London and her husband Keith was a computer expert but at weekends they liked to spend time with their two daughters and other local families. It wasn’t long before the Salmons and the Rodrigues began socialising outside school, enjoying dinner parties and barbecues at one another’s houses; it was the kind of friendship Rena had always craved. She felt as though she could talk to Lorna about anything, including her worries about her marriage.

You see, Rena had begun to feel as if Paul was slipping away from her. It had started a few years before when she’d developed chronic back pain. Depressed and largely immobile, she started to binge eat and the weight had piled on. Paul, a fitness fanatic who always took pride in keeping in shape, had tried to encourage her to eat properly:‘Come on, you’ll feel better if you just eat a little healthier,’ he’d coax her. But one of the most damaging legacies of Rena’s past was the way emotion always crowded out reason in stressful situations. Lacking any coping skills for dealing with pressure, she’d give in to her emotions. She knew she shouldn’t stuff herself with food –she knew it was driving her husband away – but that very knowledge made the urge to eat even stronger.

Paul became increasingly distant. He stayed out late after work and seemed to have lost interest in her. Their once solid marriage was looking more and more fragile. Rena had hoped that moving to a new area would provide the fresh start they needed but while they both loved being there, it hadn’t brought them closer.

‘Our sex life has really gone down hill,’ Rena confided to Lorna one day. Lorna was immediately sympathetic: ‘What you need is something to spice things up in the bedroom,’ she advised her new friend. But the sexy new underwear Rena splashed out on did nothing to stop the rot in her marriage. Paul simply didn’t seem interested. During the week he was always at work and then at weekends he’d go out drinking with friends. She never knew where he was and though she suspected there were other women, she chose to ignore this rather than face her suspicions head on. The couple became locked into that cycle that most unhappy marriages come to know so well. One partner feels the other is pulling away so they become clingy and emotionally needy which in turn pushes the other partner still further away. The word ‘divorce’ began to loom large in Rena Salmon’s fears.

She couldn’t accept it; wouldn’t accept it. Here was a woman who’d been rejected all her life. Finally she’d found someone who made her feel wanted and accepted. She’d made a life where she had a place and a value. Not only this but she’d invested all her emotional reserves, all the love she kept inside her through the dark years in her family and her man. She couldn’t live without him – he had to stay with her. She’d change, she’d get thinner; she’d start being more outgoing and less clingy. She’d do anything, anything to keep him.

What could be crueller than a once loving relationship where one partner has lost interest? What could hurt more than looking into clear eyes that were once full of love to meet only indifference? Rena knew she’d let herself get overweight and she knew her emotional dependence was driving her husband away. But she didn’t know what to do about it. Thank goodness she had Lorna to turn to in those lonely moments when it all seemed too much to bear.

But by the end of 2001, Lorna Rodrigues had other things occupying her mind apart from her friend’s marital problems: she had a new lover. Even thinking the words sent a thrill through her. She hadn’t been looking for it, hadn’t ever thought about it but then along came this man saying all the right things and wham! She’d fallen into this full-blown love affair. There were only two problems (i) he was married and (ii) he was married to her best friend.

Paul Salmon had taken to Lorna the first time he met her. She was so much fun plus she was a successful businesswoman and as the owner of a beauty salon she was always immaculately turned out – the exact opposite of his own wife, in fact. The more time Paul spent with Lorna, the more he couldn’t help comparing her to Rena. Why couldn’t Rena be more independent? Why did she always have to ask him where he was going and what he was doing? Why did the little things she did irritate him so much?

He started imagining what life would be like if it was Lorna he went home to at night instead of Rena, if it was Lorna he watched undressing before bed and if it was Lorna’s body laying beside him at night. Soon thoughts of the younger woman began to obsess him. She was never far from his mind and he knew he had to tell her how he felt.

In November 2001, after a series of chance meetings, Paul phoned Lorna and said he’d like to see her. They arranged a meeting and, with his heart pounding, he confessed his feelings. This was the moment everything else hinged on, the moment that set in motion the chain of events that came after. Did Lorna hesitate? Torn between her undeniable attraction to Paul and her loyalty to his wife, did she struggle to suppress her feelings for this married man? If the battle between guilt and temptation that waged inside Lorna Rodrigues had gone a different way, so much tragedy might have been avoided. But she was flattered. Who wouldn’t be? She loved the idea that this successful, handsome man found her attractive. Sure, it was a shame they were both married but then no one else needed to find out, did they?

Just a month later, Keith Rodrigues was looking through his wife’s email account when he came across a message that made his heart freeze:

‘It was great to be with you,’ it read, ‘to be able to hold you.’

We all think we know how we’d react when faced with a spouse’s infidelity – yell, scream, throw things, storm out. Yet for many of us the only course of action is no action, just an immediate paralysis, a wall of denial and disbelief that springs up around the heart to protect it from cracking right down the middle. Keith Rodrigues stood rooted to the spot. It couldn’t be true. Surely she wouldn’t do that to him; what about the children, too? What about the family they’d so carefully and so lovingly built up? Would Lorna really want to jeopardise all that? In shock he scrolled through the message again and again. There was no mistake, there could be no innocent explanation: his wife was having an affair.

Keith Rodrigues loved his wife; he adored her, in fact. Sure they’d had their problems over the years but what couple hadn’t? He never imagined she would have betrayed him like this and with someone they both knew. It was a real kick in the teeth for the unassuming family man. What had he done that was so wrong that it sent her running into another man’s arms? Hadn’t he been enough for her?

Any spouse discovering infidelity feels inadequate. Men in particular can feel like sexual failures, as if they haven’t been man enough to please their wives. They become haunted by visions of their spouse in bed with someone else, so-called ‘mind movies’ of the lovers having sex play incessantly through their heads as if on continuous loop. Everyone reacts in different ways. Some are angry, some disbelieving, others just broken but all they want the same result: they want it to stop.

When a trembling Keith Rodrigues confronted his wife in December 2001, deep down he knew what he wanted. More than anything he wanted Paul Salmon off the scene and his family to stay together. The couple talked long into the night. Keith was adamant Rena should know what had been going on for she was as much betrayed as he was. She had a right to be told, to know what kind of man she was living with. Plus, once Rena knew, she’d be able to keep an eye on what Paul was getting up to and maybe he’d start to leave Lorna alone.

Keith was all for telling Rena right away but Lorna managed to convince him to hold off. It was December, Christmas was round the corner and Rena wasn’t the kind of woman who’d be able to hide her feelings. What kind of festive season were the four children involved going to have if the adults around them were constantly rowing and crying? What sort of holiday was Rena herself going to have? This news was going to rip the very heart out of her carefully constructed family life. Surely he could find it in himself to give her the greatest gift of all – peace of mind – even if it was all a temporary illusion?

In the end kind-hearted Keith Rodrigues agreed to postpone dropping the bombshell – but not for long. In January 2002 he gave Rena and Paul’s daughter a lift home from school and he came in to see Rena for a chat. Taking a deep breath, he told her as gently as he could: ‘Lorna’s having an affair.’ Rena was immediately sympathetic. The poor man. She could see how upset and broken he was. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she reassured Keith, putting her arms around him. He in turn put his arms around her waist, knowing that what he was about to say would shatter her world.

‘It’s not the worst bit,’ he told her. ‘It’s Paul.’ At that moment Rena felt like she couldn’t breathe: Paul was cheating on her and with one of her closest friends. She couldn’t take it in. Yes, she’d known her marriage was shaky but she’d told herself they’d get through it. Every couple had bad patches, didn’t they? She and Paul were a team: they had two amazing children, they’d built up a great life for themselves. He wasn’t about to throw all that away, was he? Until now Rena managed to plaster over the cracks in her crumbling marriage but Keith Rodrigues’ news took a sledgehammer to all that.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she gasped. If someone had physically punched her in the stomach she couldn’t have felt more pain than she did now. It was as if a hand had seized hold of her insides and was twisting them cruelly round and round. Not Paul, not Lorna – it couldn’t be true.

Suddenly all the years fell away and once again she was the child no one wanted; the one who’d never been attractive enough or good enough; the one who’d learned to expect rejection as her birthright. She was the dark-skinned, dark-haired girl whose mother had made her feel ugly and who’d grown up feeling less worthy, less loveable than the blue-eyed, fair-skinned children all around her. Blue eyed like Lorna, fair skinned like Lorna. Trembling, her emotions rushing through her like an unstoppable force, she picked up the phone and dialled her husband’s mobile.

Paul Salmon was sitting at his desk at work when the phone rang. As soon as he answered, he knew something was very wrong. Rena’s voice was raw with grief and rage; also a hysterical venom. ‘You bastard!’ she screamed. ‘You cheating, lying bastard! You’ll never see your kids again!’ Undeterred, Paul told his wife he’d fallen in love with Lorna and wasn’t about to give her up.

Knowledge of infidelity does strange things to the mind. You start relentlessly re-examining the past and in the brutal light of this new discovery, nothing now looks the same. Events that were happy in retrospect seem to be hollow at the core. Loving words once spoken are now stripped of all meaning. The happy family picture has a dark shadow hanging over it. Even logical, well-balanced people can go dangerously off the rails confronted with a spouse’s affair. What hope then for a fragile and emotionally abused woman such as Rena?

For both couples it was a terrible time. The recriminations were endless, every conversation punctuated by ‘How could you?’ There were tears and arguments; doors were slammed and voices raised. In the end the Rodrigues made a drastic decision: they would move to Australia and start life afresh away from this mess. They’d work on being a family again, just as they had before. Keith was convinced he could make Lorna happy just as long as she was as far away as possible from Paul Salmon.

In January 2002 the Rodrigues family left for their new life and that should have been the end of the matter. But anyone who has ever been involved in an illicit love affair will tell you that sometimes the emotional high it produces is stronger than any drug and breaking contact is like breaking with an addiction, an addiction thousands of miles can’t cure.

Lorna and Paul never quite managed to break free of one another. By this stage they probably didn’t want to. Each had found in the other something missing in their marriage. Now they’d found it, they didn’t want to lose it again. Before long they were speaking on the phone.

‘Right country, wrong man,’ Lorna told Paul in one call.

Just months after setting out for her new life in Perth, she was back in the UK – alone.

Rena thought she’d rid herself of the threat that hung over her marriage. For a short while she’d allowed herself to breathe freely again, to buy a paper in the local shop without worrying about who she might bump into. But now Lorna had returned and without her husband by her side, she was more of a threat than ever.

At first Lorna moved back to Great Shefford and it wasn’t long before everyone knew that she and Paul had started their affair back up right where they’d left off. Small villages – even picturesque aga-saga ones such as this one – are a hotbed for gossip. Soon neighbours were once again looking at Rena with pity in their eyes.

‘That poor woman,’ they’d whisper. ‘Right under her nose, too.’

Rena hated the well-intentioned pity, just as she’d loathed it when she was a neglected child. She didn’t want sympathy; she wanted her marriage back. She’d put everything into that man and now he was throwing it all back in her face.

But Paul did little to reassure his distraught wife. By that stage he’d decided his marriage was well and truly over. He no longer cared about Rena or about what she might feel. He and Lorna seemed to go out of their way to rub her nose in it, once leaving empty champagne bottles and massage oil stains in the marital bed of the Salmons’ holiday home in Dorset. Paul reckoned she would just have to get used to it. They were finished and that was that. Now it was only a question of sorting out the details, the finances and the divorce.

Any mention of the ‘d’ word sent Rena into a complete tailspin. She couldn’t, wouldn’t accept it. This was her man, her life. What gave this woman the right to steal it out from under her? Things had been all right until she came along. It wasn’t fair!

Rena’s behaviour became increasingly erratic. Paul would come home to find her drunk and barely coherent. One time, after she’d been drinking and taking morphine tablets, she climbed into her car and said she was going to kill herself. He followed in his own car – according to him to take her home again and according to her to make sure she went through with it. On another occasion, he claimed she’d texted her children while they were with him in the car to say that she was going to die and she’d see them in heaven. Instead, she woke up in hospital.

At the same time as her emotional state was spiralling out of control, Rena was trying to hang onto any last vestiges of ordinary family life that would help ground her in normality. While Paul was openly seeing her former friend, Rena would stay in the family home, lovingly washing and ironing his clothes. She still clung to the notion he’d change his mind and come back to her. Other times, though, the reality of the situation would consume her and she’d be filled with a fierce, uncontrollable rage.

One day Paul was at the family home when he got a call from a clearly frightened Lorna.

‘Paul, Rena is here,’ she told him.

In the background he could hear his wife banging on the door and shouting abuse. Somehow she then managed to gain entry. The next thing he heard was the sound of Lorna crying out as Rena attacked her.

Rushing over to Lorna’s house, he saw his lover’s Saab outside with the word ‘whore’ scrawled down the side and a neighbour standing between the two women, clearly trying to keep them apart. Lorna was holding her head while Rena, still beside herself with anger, continued to hurl a tirade of abuse at her. Finally managing to bundle his wife into the garden, Paul promised her he’d be home by 8.30pm and they’d talk then. By this stage he’d have said anything just to get her to leave. But when he didn’t show up at the appointed time, Rena’s rage was re-ignited. Dragging her two children out of bed in their pyjamas, she drove back over to Lorna’s house.

‘Now you can see what sort of a man your father is!’ she yelled at the terrified children as she attacked Paul with a bunch of keys. The police were called.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned goes the old saying. Never has that been truer than in the case of Rena Salmon. Anger ate through her very being like acid. It was clear that Great Shefford was no longer big enough to contain the love-triangle threesome. In June 2002 Paul moved out of the family house and he and Lorna set up home in an apartment in Iver, Buckinghamshire. Finally they could be together shielded from Rena’s volatile and increasingly unpredictable behaviour. Lorna stopped calling herself Rodrigues and reverted to her maiden name of Stewart. For the new lovers life seemed to be getting back on course.

But for Rena, left alone in the house she once thought would be the setting of a new life for herself and her husband, there would be no getting over it. Day after day she paced the rooms, each one alive with memories of Paul and of happier times. She found it hard to concentrate on anything; some days she even found it hard to breathe. Every waking moment was consumed with thoughts of Paul and Lorna together living the life that was rightfully hers. She just couldn’t come to terms with it, any of it. Paul had vowed to love and cherish her as long as they both should live – not cast her off like last year’s fashion mistake. It couldn’t be real that he’d left her, that he was starting a life with someone else. There had to be a mistake.

If she could just find that one right thing to say, she was sure she could make him change his mind. He’d loved her once, he could love her again – all she had to do was make him see that she was still the same girl she’d been when he’d asked her to marry him all those years ago; but how?

Whenever Paul brought up the question of divorce, Rena’s insides turned to jelly. She didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t want to face it. If she gave him a divorce, he’d marry Lorna and then there’d be another woman calling herself Mrs Salmon. Her role in life, the one she’d worked so hard for, would be stolen from her. Then who would she be? Back to being no one. There would be no divorce she insisted; just a separation.

But her mind wouldn’t stop whirring. What if they had children? Lorna was only 36. It was quite possible. The very thought of it turned her stomach. She was the mother of Paul’s children. No one else had the right to that title and certainly not that backstabbing bitch who used to call herself a friend.

Rena called Paul. ‘I’ll give you a divorce,’ she apparently told him. ‘But only if you have a vasectomy. I don’t want lots of half bastards running around!’ Paul’s estranged wife was becoming increasingly unhinged. She promised her children not to make any more suicide attempts but one day she sat them down.

‘I don’t want to be alive any more,’ she told them. ‘I’m so sorry.’

The children, then aged 10 and 13, indicated they didn’t want to be left behind and so Rena made a bizarre suicide pact with them. ‘We’ll have a great holiday and then I’ll make hot chocolate laced with morphine, and we’ll lie on my bed and I’ll tell you stories until we all go to sleep,’ she said. Luckily, in her current state of mind plans made one day were sure to be ditched the next and the suicide pact never came to pass but it’s a chilling sign of how extreme her thoughts were getting.

Again and again Rena threatened to do harm to Lorna. Having been trained to use firearms in the army, most of her plans involved shooting the other woman. Paul, an avid hunter, owned three guns that he kept in the house in a locked cabinet.

‘I don’t want to kill her,’ she told friend Leone Griffin. ‘Just shoot her so that she can’t have sex with him.’ She bombarded Lorna Stewart with so many death threats on her mobile that she had to change her phone.

No one who knew her took her seriously. They assumed the threats were just a way of venting her anger. And really, they could see why she’d be enraged. Sometimes the things Lorna did and said verged on the cruel. Like when Rena asked her why she was having an affair with her husband and why she’d lied about finishing it. She supposedly replied:‘Because I can. Because you’re fat, ugly and boring!’

Paul too seemed to get some kind of pleasure out of taunting his wife. She told friends that one time he’d texted her to say he couldn’t make it back to visit the children because he was ‘too busy shagging’.

One night Lorna called Rena to tell her that she and Paul were trying for a baby. According to Rena, she’d added:‘And it’ll look just like us.’ Of course the implication was that she and Paul would have a blue-eyed, fair-skinned baby unlike Rena herself or her children, who’d inherited her darker colouring. For Rena, whose own mother had made her feel second class because of her colour, this was the lowest of all blows. Again she was being made to feel worthless because of the colour of her skin – and worse, her children were also being targeted.

Her hatred for Lorna became like a once caged tiger that has escaped and now cannot be contained. Thoughts of vengeance on the other woman were never far from her mind. Her feelings for Paul, however, were more ambiguous. One minute she hated him for what he’d done to her and the next she remembered how much she loved and adored him. Her emotions were like a pendulum swinging relentlessly back and forth through her battered brain.

One morning in early September 2002 Paul Salmon received a card from his wife. Expecting a stream of vitriol, he was surprised by the gentle, reflective and even reasonable tone of the message inside.

‘I wish I could go back to unspoiled times before hurt touched our hearts,’ she wrote. ‘If I could start from those moments once more, I’d hold you and tell you what you mean to me. I love you as I did then and always will.

‘It’s time for us to move on, but I want us to be friends for the kids.’

For the first time Paul dared to believe there might actually be some hope of an amicable divorce at least for the children’s sake. Finally it sounded as if Rena was coming to terms with what had happened and realising she had no choice but to accept it.

By the next day, however, the pendulum had swung back and once again Rena was full of rage. Picking up the phone, Paul claims to have heard his wife once again threaten to kill Lorna.

‘You’ll never see your children again!’ she yelled.

Shortly afterwards Rena Salmon phoned a nearby locksmith.

‘My husband has been killed in a car accident,’ she explained. ‘We’re separated and all the insurance policies are locked up in his weapons cabinet and the keys have gone missing. They were with him when he died.’

Sympathetic, the locksmith agreed to open the cabinet. Of course he had no idea that there was no dead husband, no insurance policy. What Rena wanted was the double-barrelled Beretta she’d bought Paul for his birthday.

Rena knew all about guns. During her time in the army she’d got used to handling them, used to the weight of them and the way they made your body jolt as you pulled the trigger. For her, guns held no fear, no mystery. They were simply a means to an end. For the next few days, Rena Salmon hugged her secret close to her chest. Knowing the cabinet was open and that she had access to weapons any time she chose gave her a sense of security and purpose lacking in the last few roller-coaster months.

No one can be really sure what she was planning to do with her new power. Was she intending to use the weapon on herself, knowing she surely wouldn’t fail this way to finish the task she’d already tried? Or was Paul the intended victim; did she lie awake at night imagining how he’d look as he pleaded for his life, finally sorry for what he’d done, for what he’d driven her to?

Three days after the locksmith opened up Paul’s gun cabinet, Rena bumped into her friend Deborah Burke. Deborah was saddened to see how the trauma of her husband’s affair and the ensuing bitter marriage break-up had affected the once smiley woman.

‘I know you’re having a rough time,’ Deborah comforted her.

Everyone in the neighbourhood knew Rena was going through hell. Locally, there was a lot of sympathy for the mother-of-two who’d invested so heavily in her marriage only to watch it blow up in her face. No wonder she was acting so strangely, people said. You couldn’t blame her if she sometimes said or did things that seemed completely out of character. So when Rena told her friend: ‘I have a gun,’ Deborah Burke didn’t take her too seriously. ‘I’m not going to kill her –just shoot her here’ (Rena indicated her abdomen) ‘so she can’t have any more babies.’ It was the kind of crazy thing people say when they’re out of their minds with grief and anger. ‘You’re going to get through this,’ Deborah reassured her. ‘You’re tough.’ But Rena didn’t seem to be listening. ‘If you see anything in the papers, it’ll be me,’ she said. Deborah laughed. ‘Well, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ She could have had no idea how soon those words would come back to haunt her.

Not everyone was taking Rena’s threats so lightly. Leone Griffin knew Rena had access to the gun cabinet and had talked to her husband Kevin about her concerns. Normally she wouldn’t have thought too much of it – after all Paul had always had firearms around the house, but Rena had been so unstable recently, talking about killing herself and even her children, as well as Lorna. Leone was worried the open gun case would prove too much of a temptation.

Kevin rang Paul, expecting him to be horrified, but he was astounded when the other man calmly told him: ‘I’m having dinner at the moment – I’ll sort it later.’ It seemed incredible. Here was a man being told his suicidal wife now had access to a gun and he seemed more concerned about finishing his dinner! Still, Paul knew his wife better than anyone. Maybe he knew these threats of Rena’s weren’t really serious. Who knows? Perhaps Rena had said this sort of things before and never acted on it. As everyone always says, you never really know what goes on behind closed doors in someone else’s relationship.

And so, in a quaint little English village where by rights Women’s Institute members should be meeting to discuss fundraising cake sales and rivalry limited to competition between different brownie groups, guns, suicide and murder were the subjects on people’s lips. Still, no one really believed anything would happen. This wasn’t Downtown LA or Hackney’s Murder Mile: this was Great Shefford, where every other house boasted a conservatory and people still attended church on Sundays.

On 10 September, the day before Paul and Rena Salmon were due in court for a divorce hearing Rena woke up feeling like a rubber band stretched so far that it was at breaking point. Today something had to give; she didn’t think she could take any more.

There are days when you feel you’ve literally reached your limit. Sure, your rational self tells you that if you can just get through this one day, this one night, everything will work itself out somehow. Yet, to the other part of yourself where emotions run as thickly as blood, one day or night more seems unthinkable.

While her daughter was getting ready for school, Rena loaded the shotgun into her Mercedes. In her version of events, she was planning to drive to Lorna’s salon in Chiswick and shoot herself in front of her, hoping a death on the premises would cause her rival’s business to nosedive. The version put forward by the prosecution in her trial asserted that it was always Lorna and not herself that was the target. In either case it’s a scenario almost too chilling to imagine. The new school year has just started. Uniforms are still virtually pristine, smart new pens nestle in virgin pencil cases. A loving mother drops her 10-year-old daughter at the school gates knowing that the boot of the car holds a shotgun and that at the end of the school day, someone will be dead and Mummy won’t be coming home.

In those circumstances how do you say goodbye? Do you dwell on a face, trying to memorise each beloved feature? Or is the adrenaline rush too strong and too urgent to allow space for emotions? Does the need to get going and do what must be done overpower the maternal urge to linger and caress? If a woman – even fleetingly – allows herself to think like a mother, can she really go ahead and do what Rena Salmon did?

Chiswick in west London is conveniently placed for easy access from Berkshire. That was one of the reasons why Lorna Stewart had been able to successfully combine running a beauty salon with being a mother. It didn’t take Rena long to drive the 60 miles there and find a parking space. Getting out of her car, she casually reached into the boot and pulled out the shotgun. Walking calmly past an electrician working on the salon – a respectable, relaxed-looking 40-something woman who just happened to be carrying a shotgun – she barely merited a raised eyebrow. Obviously there had to be a good reason for the gun, he reasoned, perhaps it was a fake or an amateur dramatics prop.

‘Don’t shoot!’ he joked, raising his hands in mock terror.

If only Rena Salmon had heeded that advice.

Instead she made her way down the salon stairs. Lorna Stewart was in the office with her bookkeeper Lindsey Rees. The two were chatting together as they went about the normal day-to-day chores that running a business entails. Lindsey was writing a cheque while Lorna – with her back to her – crouched on the floor looking through papers. It was a typical, slow weekday and the two women had no reason to suppose anything out of the ordinary was going to happen.

Hunched over the chequebook, Lindsey heard Lorna say ‘Hello Rena’ in an unemotional tone. She could have been greeting the mailman or a familiar client. Glancing up, Lindsey saw someone in the doorway. Then Lorna spoke again, using the same calm almost monotone voice.

‘So you have come to shoot me?’

The reply came back in the same chillingly calm, controlled manner.

‘Yes.’

Would things have happened differently if Lorna had used a different greeting? If she hadn’t put the idea of murder out there so it danced tantalisingly in the air between them. Was it suggestion, invitation or statement of fact?

‘What about the children?’ Lorna asked.

Rena was momentarily thrown. ‘What about your children? You have left them in Australia,’ she said, uncomprehending. It was left to Lorna to explain as if Rena herself was a child.

‘What about your children?’ she asked.

If this was a plea for her life, a desperate attempt to get Rena to reconsider, Lorna Stewart was certainly being very cool about it. Faced with the woman who’d threatened her life on numerous occasions and now stood in front of her holding a loaded gun, she never raised her voice, never became hysterical. And Rena seemed to follow her cue, remaining unnaturally calm, completely focused on Lorna, never looking anywhere else.

‘They will be looked after by Paul,’ she replied.

Then, as if there was nothing more to say, Rena fired the gun.

As Lorna toppled over and fell to the floor, Lindsey Rees jumped to her feet and ran out of the office and up the stairs. As she reached the top, she heard another shot.

Downstairs Rena Salmon walked calmly over to Lorna and took her by the hand. She maintains Lorna was still alive at this point and, as she squeezed her hand, they reverted to the close friends they’d once been – two best friends facing death together.

Rena reached for her phone and dialled 999, telling the operator: ‘I’ve just shot my husband’s mistress.’

‘Do you want to give yourself up?’ she was asked.

‘Yeah,’ came the reply. ‘I’m sitting with her.’

When the operator asked the caller’s name, there was the same unhurried and almost casual air about her reply: ‘Rena Salmon – Salmon as in the fish. Right, got to go.’

After that, Rena smoked first one cigarette and then a second as she sat next to Lorna Stewart’s now motionless body. While she waited, she sent a series of text messages.

‘I’ve shot Lorna, you pushed me to it,’ read the one she sent to husband Paul.

Then she sent a message to Leone Griffin: ‘I’ve shot Lorna. Look after my daughter for me.’

At first Leone couldn’t take it seriously.

‘I hope it’s a joke,’ she messaged back.

When she got no reply, Leone rang Rena. ‘What have you done?’ she demanded. ‘I hope you’re joking.’

But this was no joke. In the same calm voice, Rena said, ‘No, I’ve shot her. Once in the back and once in the side, and she’s lying on the floor.’

By this time Paul Salmon had received the harrowing text from his wife and was on his way to the salon. He rang Rena from his car.

‘What have you done?’ he yelled.

‘I’ve shot Lorna,’ Rena repeated.

‘Is she dead?’ Paul demanded, trying to keep control of his emotions as he drove to the scene.

‘I don’t know,’ came the answer.

There’s nothing more surreal than being in a familiar place where something cataclysmic has taken place. All the physical surroundings are the same – the grey streets, with the odd bit of litter blowing in the gutter, the same shop fronts, the same peeling posters, and yet something fundamental has shifted so it’s as if you are seeing it all for the first time. Everything is different and nothing will ever be quite the same again.

Paul Salmon pulled up in front of the salon on 10 September with his heart pounding. It was as if he was in a film, as if it was all happening to someone else. Unfortunately, this was one movie he couldn’t pause or switch off, or walk out of. By the time he arrived, the police were already there: Lorna Stewart was dead and it was all over; it was all too late.

* * * * *

After a 9-day trial in which her defence team sought to prove that she was a devoted wife who was traumatised by an unhappy childhood and pushed to the brink of insanity by a cruel and unfaithful husband, on 16 May 2003 Rena Salmon was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The court was then told that Lorna had been two months’ pregnant at the time she was killed. Rena’s worst fears had been on course, after all.

In the fallout from one violent death, many lives can be radically altered. Paul Salmon, who went on record saying he had ‘no regrets’ about his affair with love-of-his-life Lorna and no guilt about cheating on Rena, was divorced a month after the trial ended. Six months later he was engaged to his new girlfriend.

Both the Salmon and the Rodrigues children are growing up without a mother and Keith Rodrigues, who never stopped loving his wife, knows there’ll always be an empty space at special family occasions no one else can fill.

As for Rena Salmon herself, faced with a lifetime of imprisonment she has had all the time in the world to think about what she did and all the time in the world for regrets. She knows she will miss her children growing up; she’ll miss being there when they rip open their exam results and miss waving them off on their first day of university. She won’t be there to wipe their tears when they experience the first heartbreak of young love, nor will she share their everyday fears and frustrations, their disappointments and their triumphs.

Rena has told friends that Lorna haunts her and she would do anything to swap places with her. She may be eligible for parole in 2017, but even then she will take her past with her: things that are done can never be undone.

When a marriage breaks down in bitterness there are no winners and when the fetid entrails of a life together are spilled out on the pavement for all the world to see there can be only losers.

It’s something Rena Salmon knows only too well.