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
