Bringing Down the Krays by Bobby Teale

to jump when told to but so was everyone else, I could see that. I wasn’t frightened of the twins, though, not me. I was going to go for it big, make up for lost time.
    My brothers knew the score; they’d been at this game for five years already. They’d become wary. Me, I was starstruck.
    Out of the two of them, Reggie especially seemed to need a friend – someone to draw him out of always being in Ronnie’s shadow. Being with me helped him to do that. Ronnie could see Reggie and I were hitting it off, and he’d get pretty angry about it. But I understood it, sensing instinctively that Reggie admired me, not in a sexual way, but as one young man sometimes looks up to another. In another life a part of him would have liked to be me, I think – to have a wife and child and a nice little boat business on the Isle of Wight.
    But Ronnie had other plans for him, and for me too. I soon learned the kind of thing they had in mind for me. Reggie asked me how far out I could go out with my boats, as they might need me to help them get someone out of Parkhurst Prison and off the island. It all seemed like a movie, a big adventure. I was loving every minute of it.
    Not too long after this, Ronnie sent two men over to the island with a couple of large, heavy black holdalls. They told me: ‘Ronnie told us to come over with these. He wants to get rid ofall this rubbish – just papers and documents and so on. He wants you to sling it in the sea. It’s all weighted down ready for you.’ So I took the bags out to the deepest point of the Solent, where the current is at its most dangerous, and I threw the holdalls into the water. The men left without a word of explanation. Was it a body? I wasn’t going to ask.
    And by now I would do anything for them, the more villainous-seeming the better. This was better than putting out deckchairs. More and more frequently I was coming to London to run little errands for the twins – Reggie especially. Then came a really big moment. Reggie asked me to carry a gun for him. I was to have it on me, concealed, while he went into some club or other, ‘in case I need it’.
    A gun! I was made. This was proper villainy. It was a six-shot revolver, I don’t remember which make. I held it for ages, felt its weight, pushed in the shells, flicked the safety catch. I was on the Firm.
    I had to tell Alfie about it. ‘I carried a gun for Reggie today, y’know,’ I said casually. I was trying to be so cool but I had to show my elder brother that I was as much, if not more, a member of the Firm than he was.
    He was not that impressed. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘that’s what they do, the twins. They get you at it then you can’t get out.’ He told me the police had already marked him and David as associates of the Krays, and that as a result their usefulness to the twins – in, say, doing the driving or carrying a gun to a meet – was not quite what it used to be. I didn’t believe any of that. Reggie had asked me because he liked me and trusted me.
    But my marriage wasn’t going to stand it. Pat had Reggie competing for my attention. She hated it, getting more and more jealous as time went on. To be honest, we had been arguing for a while. Reggie’s arrival in my life only worsened what was already a relationship heading for the rocks.
    The few days that I went home to East Cowes, the rows got really poisonous. Tracy was just a baby. How could I do this? What the hell was I playing at hanging round with these creeps?
    It was Pat and her family who started the divorce. Her family couldn’t wait to see the back of me. Reggie put up the money for my solicitor’s bill – two thousand pounds. ‘Leave her behind,’ he’d tell me. ‘Women, what do they know?’ Reggie was only too pleased to stump up the money to buy me out of a marriage that was no longer working. His own marriage had failed, so why not mine?
    That part of my life was over: a wife, children, a home of our own. I was back