Free Frances: The Tragic Bride by Jacky Hyams Page B

whilst she was still at school. ‘He used to go round to the Shea house to see Frank,’ she remembered. ‘That’s when she would come in from school. And one day Reggie came to see me and said, “I wanna ask you something. Frankie Shea’s got a sister. Oh, he’s got a lovely sister. She’s so nice. I do like her. But… I think she’s too young for me. She’s still at school.”
    ‘I said, when she leaves school, ask her out with you. And he kept on about her.
    Reggie said, “She’s got lovely eyes. Don’t you think I’m a bit too old?”
    ‘I’d say, “Not really. If she wants to go out with you, what’s the difference?”’
    Reggie’s relationship with Rita was, without doubt, a very strong one: he’d confide in her frequently. She recalled her surprise when he first mentioned Frances. This, she told me, wasn’t really the Reggie Kray she knew: ‘I’d never seen him like that before. Women? He could take them or leave them before he met her. He’d go out with these girls and they’d stay the night with him at Violet’s.
    ‘Then he’d drop them off in my mum’s house next door. And they’d wait for him to come back. Well, he wasn’t coming back, was he? And he always picked good-looking girls.’
    That day, on the doorstep of the Shea house, when Reggie knocked on their front door to be greeted for the first time by schoolgirl Frances, was certainly a moment in time Reggie would never forget.
    Wherever his sexual tastes lay up to that point, whatever the complexity of his relationship with Ronnie or his crimes, there seems little doubt that the minute he saw the pretty auburn-haired teenager with the big eyes, he experienced something of a shock. It is what the French call ‘le coup de foudre’, a bolt of lightning – which some describe as love at first sight.
    He recalled that moment in correspondence to Frances in May 1961. In his letter, Reggie told her he’d been thinking about the first time he saw her. He’d knocked on the door to see Frankie and she had opened it. ‘You looked at me with a curious look in your big dark eyes and made me feel a little awkward. I never thought at the time I would depend on you so much, just goes to show you never can tell.’
    Reggie’s letter then told her that ‘falling in love with you was the best thing that ever happened to me. Any time you want to put me in my place, just give me a look with your big dark eyes.’
    The letter goes on to recall how he’d even conveyed the significance of that first doorstep impression to her brother. ‘I said, “Your sister gave me a look and weighed me up and down and made me feel awkward…”’
    Frank had quipped back and said that was nothing: ‘You should talk to her.’
    ‘I said, “She looks saucy”.’
    Since that moment, Reggie recalled, he knew Frances was saucy, curious, mischievous, better looking than ever, everything he dreamed a girl should be. He went on to say he had never regretted knocking at her door ‘because I’ve been in love with you ever since and always will be.’
    Whether it was Reggie’s arrival in her life that led to Frances leaving school before her sixteenth birthday in 1959 or whether the decision had nothing to do with it is not known.
    But the fact remains that Reggie, on that memorable day, fell so in love with a pretty schoolgirl, he could only dare discuss his romantic feelings with a woman he’d trusted since childhood. He would never have dared confide all this to his twin. He knew all too well what the response would be.
    It looks like he simply took Rita’s advice and waited until Frances was working. There were, indeed, other serious preoccupations for Reggie in those years from 1957–60.
    His brother, for one. Once certified insane at Long Grove, and prescribed a new type of drug called Stemetil, which seemed to curb his suicidal impulses and calm him down, Ronnie started to realise, on Reggie’s visits, how successful his twin was without him –