by John Pearson
Around lunchtime her father had just returned to Ormsby Street when his son came rushing in, shouting that Frances was dead. He had his Mini parked outside and they drove to the flat. Frank Shea did not believe she was really dead. Twice he had saved her from attempted suicide; somehow it must be possible again, and when he saw her on her bed she seemed as peaceful as if simply sleeping. He took her hands to wake her, ‘but I could feel her arms already stiffening. It was her third go – this time there was nothing we could do. She had been dead some hours. It was a terrible thing, but all that I could think was how those bastards had destroyed my daughter.’
Reggie arrived later. When Frank Shea had gone his son sent a messenger to Vallance Road asking for him. He came, knowing that something had happened to Frances; but like Frank Shea, it was not until he took her hands that he knew she was dead. And like him, he felt enormous hatred at her death.
‘I blamed her parents. They didn’t want her to be happy with me. They just kept on and on until she killed herself.’
That afternoon he drank himself insensible. That night he stayed beside her, kneeling on the floor, and all the time the bitterness grew worse until it swallowed up his grief.
The Sheas spent the night at Ormsby Street remembering Frances and the things she said before she died. The twins alone had been responsible for what had happened; they had defiled her and used her and would never let her go. Now she had escaped from them for good, ‘but they as good as murdered her, the two of them’.
At the inquest the dead woman’s husband gave evidence of identification; a Dr Julius Silverstone spoke of ‘personality disturbances’; the post-mortem showed that she had died of a massive overdose of phenobarbitone taken in the night. The coroner recorded his verdict of ‘suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed’.
Then the Krays took over the girl’s funeral just as, two years before, they had made all arrangements for her marriage. Reggie returned to Father Hetherington to ask him to perform the ceremony; this time he agreed. The funeral turned out to be as impressive a display of public grief as the marriage had been of rejoicing. Ten solemn-looking limousines were hired for mourners. Each member of the Firm had sent a wreath, as had the friends and allies of the Krays throughout the underworld. Reggie sent three, including a six-foot heart of scarlet roses pierced with a white arrow of carnations. He spent £200 on her plot in Chingford Cemetery, large enough for him to be buried with her when his time came. The funeral became a sort of triumph for the Krays: Reggie was treating Frances as lavishly in death as in life.
The graveside scene might well have been a gangster’s burial – the fresh-dug earth heavy with wreaths, a mass of sombre villains paying their respects, police among the mourners on the off-chance that Ronnie might appear.
‘The bastards,’ Reggie said, ‘had no respect for human dignity.’
But Ronnie was too canny to be caught like this and merely sent a large wreath of carnations. The funeral was the one occasion where Reggie was alone. Weeping for all to see as Frances was lowered into the grave, he watched the first spadeful of earth thud on the coffin, threw in a fiver for the gravediggers and walked away.
In a letter afterwards he wrote:
‘I relived all the good times we had had together. Milan, where we had gone to the Scala Theatre to watch Madame Butterfly, Barcelona and the bull-fights, the South of France, Rotterdam, Holland, drinking in the Blue Lagoon Club and many other places and good times. The first time we had met and I had fallen in love looking at my wife’s beautiful brown eyes and long lashes. Now all this was gone but the memories will stay for me forever.’
Then he wrote a poem, which was printed in a gold-and-white memorial card together with a photograph of ‘my dear wife Frances who passed away, 7th June 1967, aged 23 years’. It was called ‘If’:
If I Could climb upon a passing cloud
that would drift your way
I would not ask for a more beautiful day,
Perhaps I would pass a rainbow,
With Nature’s Colours so beautifully aglow,
If you were there at the Journey’s End,
I would know
It was the beginning and not the End.
Reg.’
But behind the public grief and the sentimentality, a battle had gone on between the families: the mourning had turned sour with hatred.
Reggie insisted that Frances was to be buried in her wedding dress; when she was safely underground her parents said that they had arranged with the undertaker to have a slip and pair of stockings put on her so that as little as possible of the hated dress touched her skin. They also claim to have switched her wedding ring at the last minute for a small ring she wore as a child. Then there was trouble over the name to be used at the burial and on the tombstone. The Sheas said they found a note from her asking to be buried in the name of Shea; despite this the funeral took place in the name of ‘Frances Shea, otherwise Kray’, and her elaborate Carrara marble headstone carries the name Frances Kray.
She left no will; as next-of-kin Reggie inherited her estate. More bitterness was caused when he arrived at Ormsby Street and took away his letters and the jewellery he had given her.
‘After the funeral, it was like he had a breakdown. He became like Ronnie, drunken an’ full of hate, an’ all the strength went out of ’im.’ This is how one of the Firm remembers him, and according to Tommy Cowley, who was often with him now, the death of Frances triggered a complete collapse. ‘Over the years Reg had simply had too much to bear from Ronnie, and it had got so bad that when Reggie had this trouble over Frances on top of everything he couldn’t take it. That’s why he was so badly hurt. When we’re hurt we look around for somebody to hate and he looked everywhere. He really wanted to take vengeance on himself, but he took it against a lot of others on the way.’
Reggie said, ‘I drank more than ever, but started to visit my friend, Father Hetherington, pretty often; he always made me feel a lot better after a visit as he is the most understanding man I know.’
At other times the gin would make him dangerous. He would start by getting maudlin over Frances but the sentiment soon turned to bitterness; he would sit up drinking gin laced with strong black coffee to keep him awake, all the time mulling over everything he could blame upon the Sheas. Hatred can sharpen up the memory and he forgot nothing; soon the Sheas became responsible for what had happened, not just to Frances, but to him. He was convinced that they had destroyed his marriage. Everything could then be blamed on them. Nothing was his fault or Ronnie’s. All his unhappiness, the breakdown of his life, had one root cause – the Sheas.
‘I should have killed ’em. Would have saved a lot of bother.’
However drunk he got he never dared. Frances would have known and not forgiven him. A few days after the funeral he got as far as having Frankie Shea brought to the pub where he was drinking, but he had forgotten the uncanny resemblance between the two Shea children. He began weeping and sent him away. If he had to have revenge, he would need other victims than the Sheas.
The first was a friend called Frederick. His name came up quite casually during a drunken row between the twins: Ronnie said something to make him think that Frederick had not liked Frances. This was enough. Reggie swore that he would kill him and sat up all night nursing his hatred; by 6 A.M. the third bottle of Gordon’s gin had produced a sullen fury. The hatred of the last few weeks could spend itself.
Two members of the Firm were sleeping in Reggie’s flat; he woke them. One had an old green van; they drove in it to a pub in Stoke Newington where the landlord always kept a gun or two for the twins. Reggie collected a revolver. The green van drove on to the modern flat where Frederick lived with his wife and children. By now it was nearly 7 A.M. and people were passing on their way to work. Reggie rang the bell. Frederick’s wife was seeing to the children and answered the door.
‘Tell Frederick Reggie’s here,’ said the man from the green van.
Afterwards she
realized she should have slammed the door in their faces, but the children were all round her; Reggie blundered past her and one of the men ripped the wires from the telephone. Reggie began shouting for her husband. He was washing and came to the head of the stairs.
‘You never liked my wife, you bastard. Now you talk about her behind my back. You shouldn’t talk about her. Not about my Frances.’
Reggie was sobbing at him, pointing the gun up the stairs; there was a scuffle as one of the Firm tried to bring Frederick down. The children and the wife began to scream, Reggie was shouting. Frederick was hit on the head, and as he came tumbling down the stairs Reggie started shooting. All except one of the shots went wide; the one that did connect passed through Frederick’s leg, and he lay groaning and bleeding at the foot of the stairs. Reggie seemed satisfied. The others helped him back into the van and drove away. Hunched in the front seat he kept muttering. ‘The bastard was saying things about my wife, about my lovely Frances.’
Tears streamed down his cheeks.
‘Drunken slag,’ said Ronnie when he heard what his twin had done. ‘Risking our necks like that. Here we are, making ourselves a living and getting straight and you risk everything shooting one of our friends, you drunken pig.’
Their brother Charlie stopped the trouble going any further. An old friend of Frederick’s, he was somehow able to smooth things over, calling a discreet doctor in to tend the wound, explaining about Reggie and making sure the police were kept out.
‘You couldn’t kill a man if you tried,’ said Ronnie during his next row with Reggie. ‘You’re too fucking soft. When I did my one, I made a job of it. Cornell couldn’t walk around no more like Frederick.’
For Reggie much of life was like a dream. There were quite lucid periods when he was sober and puzzled at what was happening. Sometimes he felt horror at himself; these were the times when he would visit Father Hetherington and ask him to pray for him. More often everything was so unreal that all he wanted was escape – a long East African safari where he could harden up and learn to live with himself again. North Africa, the piece of land he and Frances had bought at Bantry Bay. He did his best to keep in trim with early morning runs around Victoria Park and weekends by the sea at Steeple Bay.
The dreams of her recurred; the guilt, the hatred began stirring. Frances was gone. He was alone except for Ronnie. Once he began to drink and feel the violence rise within him, he was at Ronnie’s mercy. In July the case against the police inspector was finally dismissed. Ronnie emerged from hiding. The shootings began in earnest. Reggie was usually drunk, always mourning Frances.
One night he turned up at the Starlight Club in Highbury demanding £1,000 on the spot from a man called Fields. Fields said he had not got it; Reggie shot him through the leg and left one of the Firm to smash his face in.
‘I would have shot the bastard through the head,’ said Ronnie.
Reggie bumped into Buller Ward at the Regency Club. Relations with the old boxer had cooled since the night Ronnie branded Jonathan for beating up his son. Reggie punched him on the jaw.
‘You’ll have to do better than that, Reggie boy,’ said Ward, riding the blow. As Reggie had no gun on him he knifed his face wide open.
‘Better to have done him with a shooter,’ his twin insisted.
A few nights later, at the Green Dragon Club, Ronnie showed him how it should be done. A former friend called George Dixon had said something that annoyed the twins and was careless enough to be at the bar when they walked in. Ronnie went up to him as he did once to George Cornell, drew an automatic and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
‘Here,’ said Ronnie, taking the bullet from the chamber and handing it to Dixon. ‘It’s just saved your life. Wear it on your watch-chain as a souvenir.’
With Ronnie on the scene again, the Firm’s business became wilder: big-money projects dwindled, but the twins’ name was still sufficient to guarantee a likely living. That summer they began a racket peddling purple hearts from an address in Soho; they had an old acquaintance who was manufacturing them by the million in an Essex farmhouse. They took over fruit machines throughout the West End. They also ventured into the pornography business, taking their cut from several illicit wholesalers and importers.
Besides these actual rackets Ronnie had his dreams. Africa still beckoned: he was excited by a complicated plan to take over a diamond-mine in the Congo. Later there was talk of the Firm’s services being used to assassinate President Kaunda. Neither proposal seemed to come to anything; nor did another idea of Ronnie’s, to master-mind a big chain of forged currency deals, with the plates made in New York by a virtuoso forger, notes mass-produced in Switzerland and Europe flooded with a sea of bogus currency.
Ronnie was offered money to assassinate the Fascist leader, Colin Jordan. A member of the Firm was sent to Switzerland to negotiate a link-up with one of the Messina brothers for a new vice syndicate in London. Two others went to Tangier to meet a representative of the family of the late Moise Tshombe; Ronnie had been told that they would pay half a million dollars for a viable plan to free the hijacked Congo leader from detention in Algiers. His plan included the use of helicopters, nerve gas and a strike-force from the Firm fighting their way into the Tshombe villa. Tshombe would make his getaway by hovercraft. For two days discussions went on at the Rif Hotel between the men from the Tshombes and the men from the Krays; but Ronnie’s ideas appeared extreme, and after a great deal of talking and drinking one more potential customer finally went elsewhere.
It was an uneasy summer. A tall man with a Belfast accent had been reported in the East End talking to people about George Cornell. When Ronnie checked on him he found that his name was Mooney. He was a detective inspector from the Yard’s Flying Squad.
More rumours came in then about a police spy on the Firm. Ronnie had never trusted anyone except Reggie and his mother. Now his suspiciousness began to spread through the Firm: nobody knew who might betray him. One member of the Firm had a fight with Scotch Jack Dickson and blinded him in one eye with a bottle. When Dickson came out of hospital Ronnie told him he should get revenge.
The comradeship within the Firm was not improved when two of its members disappeared after trouble with Ronnie. One was his driver, a talkative young man called Frost; there was a rumour that he had tried blackmailing Ronnie over a boy. Soon after, he was followed by Mad Teddy Smith. There had been a long weekend at Steeple Bay with Ronnie and some boys; there was an argument, a fight and Teddy was never seen again. The twins never spoke about him; nobody asked questions. To this day Frost and Teddy Smith remain on Scotland Yard’s missing-persons list.
From then on the Firm became an isolated world of violence and mistrust, with each man for himself. The man who left the Firm received various threats and a dead rat in the post; on his birthday there was a funeral wreath outside his door. But despite the danger and the atmosphere, there remained definite attractions in the Firm. Money was one: the twins could still ensure that everyone in favour collected a minimum of £40 a week in personal protection money. Prestige was another: the twins were still the most feared gangsters in the country. Anyone working for them could do much as he liked in gangland, drink what he felt like for free, cadge money on the side, never go hungry for a woman.
For some of the Firm this was enough; they were quite ready to desert when the time arrived but not before. Some of the younger ones genuinely lived for the excitement and intrigue. There was the twins’ own cousin, Ronnie Hart, a big, good-looking one-time sailor from the merchant navy. As he explained, his greatest aim in life was ‘to be different from the ordinary person. Best of all I’d like to have been a mercenary in the Congo.’ Being with the twins was easier. ‘It’s the adventure that I really go for. With them it’s just like being a spy or something in the underground movement.’ The secrets and intrigue had their own fascination; so did the air of danger and depravity round the Colonel. One of Hart’s favourite duties was to take the twins’ special gues
ts for a drink at the saloon bar at The Blind Beggar. The place where George Cornell was shot was becoming one of the sights of the East End.
There were a lot like Hart who hung around the twins for the kicks and the adventure – and because Ronnie was a murderer; this had become his principal social asset. That autumn a pair of unemployed half-Greek brothers called Lambrianou tried to become accepted in the Firm. Ronnie said they must prove themselves first.
Ronnie never understood the ordinary person’s ambivalence over murder. Most people seem fascinated by it but never dream of doing it; he dreamed of little else. For him the terrible taboo between the idea of murder and the reality did not exist. Life was far simpler without it. The nearest he came to giving an excuse for shooting George Cornell was to shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Well, it needed to be done, didn’t it? Can’t see what all the fuss was about.’
It was because he couldn’t see, that further tension built up in the Firm, as he began persuading others to kill. Hart was one of the first; Ronnie seemed to think that because his young cousin wanted adventure, he felt as he did. But when he sent him off to kill a man for him in Romford Market, Hart fired a shot in the air, dropped the gun and ran for it. It was worse with Reggie. Time after time their arguments came back to the point that Reggie must ‘do his one’. But Reggie found that while he could shoot a man in the leg or cut him in the face or break his jaw, he drew the line at murder. This saddened Ronnie; ‘I have to do the dirty work for everyone. Somebody else should have a go.’
That autumn Ronnie felt increasingly put upon. There were a lot of people needing to be killed – the list was lengthening. Payne was on it now that he had left them; so was Freddie Gore. The man in Romford Market had been included as a favour to a friend in Broadmoor, whose wife he had slept with. Besides him there were the potential traitors, the competitors, the ‘liberty takers’. There was work for everyone, and Ronnie had the idea now of using murder as a test of loyalty. Since all the talk of traitors on the Firm, he remembered what he had learned about the Leopard Men when he was in Nigeria: the secret brotherhood of killers who had terrorized the countryside with ritual murders. With them murder was used as an initiation to the gang; later it formed a bond of loyalty between the murderers.
