Deadly Divorces (2 page)

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.