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Deadly Divorces. Tammy Cohen
Читать онлайн.Название Deadly Divorces
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781843586890
Автор произведения Tammy Cohen
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
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