‘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,