Deadly Divorces. Tammy Cohen

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ