Deadly Divorces (13 page)

Put yourself in Derek Symmons’ shoes. You’ve been with your partner for the best part of 40 years. Though you might have cheated on her, bullied her and even perhaps fantasised about how your life would be without her, she’s always been a constant. But now you’ve killed her; you’ve murdered the mother of your children. In a moment that can never be undone you’ve destroyed your family, your home, everything you’ve built up over the years. How do you deal with such knowledge? How do you process such shock?

According to Derek, he simply went into a kind of automatic state where he remembers nothing of the long hours following the murder or of getting back into the car in the early morning and circumnavigating a still-sleeping London on the way to Dover. Nor could he remember the cross-channel ferry journey or driving the car out of the Calais docks and negotiating his way onto the French motorway. His trance came to an abrupt end late in the afternoon, he later claimed, when his mobile rang as he was driving through the French countryside. It was his daughter Claire. Alarmed that her mother hadn’t shown up to look after the baby, she was trying to track her down.

Christine had been due at her daughter’s house at 6.15 that evening to take over baby-duties for a while. She did this at least five times a week and new mum Claire really depended on those visits. With her doctor husband out of the house most of the day, she found it impossible to get on with anything and look after the baby at the same time – some days it was hard enough even to get dressed. So when her mum hadn’t turned up at the usual time, Claire started to worry. With the baby over her shoulder, she’d paced up and down the living room, straining to hear the sound of her mum’s car door slamming. It would be the welcome signal that she’d have some respite – a little time to clear up or take a bath, or just sit down for a moment and close her eyes. Increasingly impatient, she’d tried ringing her parents’ house but there was no answer. Eventually she decided to call her father’s mobile.

‘Have you seen Mum?’

That question jolted the 62-year-old out of his traumatised state and into the reality of what he’d done. ‘I have done something terrible,’ he told his daughter. ‘You will never forgive me.’ The words formed an icy claw around Claire’s heart. Her mum had been so scared of her father recently and it was so unlike her to fail to turn up when she said she would. She couldn’t bear to think what it might all mean.

‘Why don’t you come over and we’ll talk about it?’ Claire asked, with trepidation.

‘I can’t, I’m in France,’ came the reply.

His daughter just couldn’t make sense of it, didn’t
want
to make sense of it. A horrible sickening feeling was gathering inside her.

‘Where’s Mum?’ she asked again.

‘She’s with me,’ Derek replied. ‘There was a struggle and she’s dead.’

The horror building inside 30-year-old Claire came gushing to the surface in one piercing scream. ‘Tell me you’re joking,’ she begged. ‘
Please
tell me you’re joking.’ Above all things she wanted to hear her father’s strange voice return to normal and for him to say ‘’Course I am, you silly thing! You didn’t think I’d really killed her, did you?’ But in her rational brain she knew that wasn’t going to happen. In the course of one phone call, her safe and comfortable world had been twisted into a nightmare and nothing would ever be the same again.

A short while later, even as his distraught daughter was on the phone to police in the UK, telling them what had happened, Derek Symmons pulled his BMW estate into the car park of the Hotel Mercure. He had an idea in his head that he’d stay one night and then continue down to the south of France in the morning. He had friends there and he’d see them for the last time then perhaps turn himself in. But the conversation with Claire and a subsequent conversation with her brother, where he’d repeated his story and affirmed Christine’s body was in the boot of the car, released the flood of emotions he’d been damming up since the previous evening. This was no game – he really had killed his wife.

Derek couldn’t hold it in any more – he had to tell
someone. He was racked with sorrow and remorse for what he’d done, although whether his distress was for his wife or for himself is something that will never be fully known.
Wild-eyed
and grief-torn, he approached the reception desk.

‘I’ve done something terrible – I’ve killed my wife,’ he said.

On 11 December 2006, Derek Symmons was found guilty of murdering his wife and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 16 years. A jury at St Albans Crown Court took less than 3 hours to dismiss his claims of having killed Christine in self-defence after her taunts about his sexual prowess sparked a violent row.

His children have disowned him. ‘Words cannot begin to describe the most dreadful, devastating feeling you get when you are told your mother is dead and has been killed by your father,’ a still-grieving Claire said after the court case.

By the time he gets out Derek Symmons will be an old man. He may even die in prison. If his wife had divorced him, the one thing of which he was so afraid, then he would have lost his high standard of living and perhaps his home and maybe even part of his pension.

As it is, he’s lost everything.

I
f you work in Manchester’s bustling city centre – a diverse but intense and demanding metropolis, where high commerce butts right up against student culture and gang members rub shoulders with television producers – few places can be more relaxing to come home to at night than Bowdon, near Altrincham.

The genteel, leafy Cheshire suburb, with its wide,
tree-lined
avenues and well-preserved old stone parish church, offers a perfect contrast to the vibrant multiculturalism of Manchester itself. Nightlife is most likely to be a quiet glass of wine in the Stamford Arms pub or maybe a charity ball. On summer weekends tennis and cricket are staple activities here, as is competitive croquet at the local sports
club. In this part of the world, winters can be harsh but the regular church fundraisers and games of bridge in front of roaring log fires take the chill off the outside air.

Little wonder then that Christopher Lumsden, a respected partner in the international law firm Pinsent Masons – which had offices in Manchester, as well as other, key UK cities – always looked forward to returning home to Bowdon and never more so than on Fridays. After a taxing working week he was finally able to take off his pinstriped suit and relax. Of course it didn’t hurt that ‘home’ to the high-flying lawyer was Oakleigh, a
£
2m, stone-built mansion surrounded by rolling lawns and spreading trees. Or that his wife Alison who’d given up a successful career to devote herself to looking after the house and the couple’s two children always made sure there was a warm, welcoming atmosphere in their otherwise imposing home.

On Friday 11 March 2005, 52-year-old Christopher was relieved to find there were no social engagements on – just a cosy evening at home with Alison, or Ali, as she was known to her many friends in the village and at the local tennis club, where she was social secretary. Never quite as sociable as his outgoing wife, Christopher had become more reclusive since being diagnosed with a rare muscle wasting disorder in November of the previous year. The discomfort in his back, which he’d always put down to an old rugby injury, turned out to be a progressive and
debilitating illness that would eventually put him in a wheelchair and might even kill him within three years. For the previously fit, tennis-loving lawyer it was a shattering blow, and one which months later he was still having extreme difficulty coming to terms with. It wasn’t the prospect of dying that bothered him, more the idea of living with an incurable illness that was only going to get worse.

On one occasion he’d even thought about killing himself, although after driving into the countryside to contemplate suicide, having dropped his wife off at a tennis game, he’d decided to give life another chance. But that evening he was trying not to dwell on depressing thoughts; he just wanted to have a quiet and relaxing time with the wife he’d adored for more than 25 years. As their children – Thomas, 20, and Kate, 17 – were away from home, it would be a chance for the two of them to catch up and perhaps repair a bit of the distance his recent reclusive behaviour had wrought in their marriage.

But tonight Ali seemed on edge. Usually vivacious and gregarious, the blonde 53-year-old with the big smile that seemed to put people from all walks of life at ease despite her cut-glass accent, was unusually reserved and distracted. At dinner, where she’d normally have held forth about what was going on in the village, or what she’d done in London the weekend before, she was uncharacteristically silent. Afterwards, when they’d just settled in to watch television and Christopher was finally beginning to feel the
stress of his working week lift from his shoulders, Ali got to her feet. With a decisive movement, she switched off the TV and turned to face her husband.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she began.

Christopher blinked at her in surprise, his round, pudgy face registering an expression of bewilderment. What could she possibly have to say that would merit this dramatic fanfare? But what Ali told him that night shook up everything he’d ever taken for granted or held as true: she’d been having an affair for the last month with a family friend and she wanted a divorce. In his professional capacity Christopher had developed the skill of remaining outwardly calm and dispassionate when confronted by shocking or unsettling news, processing it internally so that his response, when it came, would always be measured and thoughtful. This is how he dealt with his wife’s revelation that she’d fallen in love with Roger Flint.

The Flints – Roger and his wife Fiona – belonged to the same social set as Alison and Christopher. The four sometimes played doubles together at the tennis club or met for occasional games of bridge. One year the two families even spent part of their holidays together when they’d coincidentally ended up in the same vicinity. Though they weren’t close companions, they were definitely friends, so the double betrayal hit Christopher hard – ‘I felt stunned and numb. Alison had betrayed me with somebody I regarded as a friend. She abandoned me.’

Rubbing more salt on the wound was the timing of their affair, which had begun on 12 February, just weeks after the funeral of Christopher’s mother, whose death had hit her son surprisingly hard.

It’s often said that the worst thing for betrayed partners to comprehend is not that their beloved could do such a terrible thing to them, but that it wasn’t done ‘to them’ at all, that they were completely inconsequential in the face of this new and exclusive, all-absorbing passion. When Ali had danced with Roger Flint at a birthday party at Bowdon Lawn Tennis Club, she just wasn’t thinking about Christopher – in fact it was a relief to have some time without him. They’d been so remote from one another recently she’d even moved into the spare room, ostensibly to get relief from his snoring, but also to allow them both some space to think. His illness seemed to have taken the spirit out of him, so that, even if he had been physically able, he had no interest in doing all the things they’d previously loved to do together. She was becoming increasingly frustrated.

When Roger, who also had two children, confessed he’d been harbouring feelings for her, it must have seemed like a window opening to let fresh air into what was becoming a rather stifling existence. Just when she’d begun to think nothing exciting would ever happen to her again, when she’d resigned herself to living in an increasingly unsatisfying marriage, here was a man offering her a chance
of something new, making her feel attractive and vital again.

The couple started meeting for lunch, talking for hours and making each other roar with laughter. Being together felt so right. They even managed to get away together for a couple of days at the beginning of March. Alison said she was going to London but instead she and Roger stayed in Cornwall. By the time they got back, she knew her marriage was over, but she was dreading breaking the news to Christopher. He’d been through such a lot recently and she knew it might look as though she was abandoning him just when he needed her the most. But she was 53 years old and this kind of opportunity may not come again. This was her chance of happiness and she intended to seize it with both hands.

After dropping the bombshell, Ali broke down in tears from a mixture of guilt and relief. She was glad Christopher, though naturally devastated, seemed to be taking it so stoically and she allowed herself to hope that this might be that rarest of animals, the amicable divorce. At 9.46 that evening, she sent a text to her lover:

‘It’s done. All calm and reasonable as expected so can’t stop crying at moment. He wants to speak 2u b4 u speak to F [Roger’s wife, Fiona]. I’m exhausted.’

After the whirlwind of her romance with Roger, followed by the build-up to the confession and the confession itself, Alison felt she’d been through the emotional wringer. Her mind raced with conflicting
emotions – excitement about the future, grief for the past, and above all, a kind of hammering awareness that nothing in her life would ever be the same again. An hour after the first text to Roger Flint, she sent another one:

‘Darling, we must talk tomorrow AM. I am feeling huge relief but I’m also overwhelmed at the enormity of what I’ve just done.’

For Alison, telling Christopher she wanted a divorce represented the closure of one chapter of her life and the beginning of another. For her husband, however, it just spelled the end: end of his marriage, end of his happiness, end of his life. He was already facing the loss of his health and now he was going to lose his wife as well. Over the next few days he sank into depression and became obsessed with the thought that Ali was turning her back on him because he was an invalid and could no longer keep up with her. Again and again, he tried to get her to reconsider, offering to move jobs, houses, even towns, if she’d just give their marriage another chance. With every refusal, his spirits plummeted further. At his office, he’d spend hours pondering the financial implications of a divorce and thinking about cutting her out of his will and reducing her share in joint assets. It was one way of trying to get her to pay for what she was doing to him.

As he’d asked his wife not to tell anyone about their separation until the end of the school year so it wouldn’t affect their daughter’s AS-level exams, Christopher knew
he had a little time to try to sort things out. At heart, however, he was well aware this was just delaying the inevitable and that financial retribution wasn’t going to change anything. Ultimately he was still going to be left alone to cope with his ever more debilitating illness, while Ali and her strong, fit lover built an new exciting life for themselves. It didn’t help that Ali gave him suggestions on how to make things better for himself. ‘She said I should get a life and date some people,’ Christopher would later tell a court. ‘I was like a drowning man needing a life raft.’

Reluctantly Christopher went to see a divorce lawyer, breaking down as he talked through details of the forthcoming separation. The few people he confided in were sympathetic and gave him the speech all soon-to-
be-divorced
people become very familiar with – you’ll meet someone else, you’ll enjoy being single, plenty more fish in the sea. So, on Tuesday, 15 March, at a business function at Manchester Art Gallery, Christopher decided to try to implement a more positive approach. After complimenting blonde Debbie Sandler, the PR expert who’d organised the party, he asked whether she accepted invitations to drinks. At first, Debbie was delighted, thinking the lawyer was talking on a professional level about perhaps getting her some business with his firm, but his next words disabused her of that notion: ‘I’m going through a divorce. It would be nice to have someone to talk to.’

Debbie had no interest in becoming a shoulder for a
reluctantly single, middle- aged lawyer to cry on so she made her excuses and left. The following morning – Wednesday, 16 March – her phone rang. It was Christopher Lumsden. ‘I’m a man of my word,’ he told her, with forced jollity. ‘I said I’d ask you out for that drink.’ Debbie was mortified. She knew she was going to have to be blunt so he didn’t get the wrong idea and she told him clearly that she wouldn’t be going out with him. ‘That’s a pity,’ Christopher replied, his lawyer’s training helping to smooth over any traces of hurt or self-pity. ‘You see, I’m going away very soon and I have no idea how long I’ll be gone.’ Was it a way of saving face having had his advances rebuffed? Or was Christopher Lumsden predicting his own future before it had even begun?

That evening he went to see a colleague of his who’d been through a bitter separation of his own. Like anyone who’s gone through a divorce, said to be the second most traumatic life-changing event after bereavement, he needed the reassurance of talking to someone who had been where he was now and come through the other side. Again, the usually tightly buttoned lawyer wept as he talked about what was happening and how completely powerless he felt. First his health and now his marriage were being snatched away from him and there was nothing he could do.

When he got back to Oakleigh, Ali was out. The house seemed dark and cold. Christopher must have wondered if that was how it would be from now on – coming home to
an empty house. His mood slipped even further into darkness at the thought of all the lonely nights to come. Miserably, he got ready for bed, putting on his pyjamas and going into the spare room where Ali had been sleeping to turn on the electric blanket so it would be warm for her when she got home. Then he went back to his own bed and started reading.

Ali, meanwhile, had had a lovely evening. She and Roger Flint had enjoyed dinner together at a restaurant in nearby Plumley. They’d both been feeling so much better after confessing their feelings to their respective spouses. Though obviously there had been some deeply unpleasant, upsetting scenes, by and large everyone seemed to be behaving in a remarkably civilised way. Things seemed to be ‘moving along without too much upset,’ Roger Flint would comment later on. The two lovers were just relieved that everything was now out in the open and soon they’d be able to be together.

After leaving the restaurant, they drove home to Altrincham in separate cars, finally parting at about 10.25pm. That was the last time Roger Flint would see Ali Lumsden alive. What went through Ali’s head as she pulled up outside the storybook home in which her marriage had slowly suffocated to death? Did she wonder about Christopher – lying in bed waiting for her to return – and how he’d cope when there was no longer anyone to wait up for? Or was her mind so firmly fixed on the glorious
future so nearly within reach that she had no thoughts to spare for what had passed and was now done?

Letting herself in through the heavy door, Ali made her way straight upstairs. Seeing Christopher’s light still on, she went into the bedroom and sat down at the dressing table to take off her make up, as she had done so many times before over the course of their marriage. That’s when something inside Christopher Lumsden snapped. His own memories of that night are sketchy. Did Alison say something about his deteriorating health? Was the word ‘cripple’, which he later claimed to have heard spoken out loud, just whispered inside his own mind? Did he get an image of his wife with Roger Flint, together, as they had been only minutes before?