The Profession of Violence

waiting to drive me to an undisclosed destination in the country, and half an hour or so beyond Newmarket we went through a pair of elaborate park gates and drove towards a large Elizabethan mansion. Apart from horses grazing in the paddock there was no sign of life, and the car drove round the back of the enormous house. We stopped. The driver hooted and finally a door did open. Three men emerged to welcome me. They stood with some formality and my driver announced them like some old-school boxing referee, ‘Mr Charles Kray, Mr Ronald Kray, Mr Reginald Kray.’ Luncheon was waiting and my book had started.
It was one of the more memorable meals of my life

there, scrapping just as viciously beside him

I noticed his right hand was bandaged. (He had cut his thumb rather badly murdering Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie a few weeks earlier.)
‘How did you hurt yourself, Mr Kray?’ I inquired brightly.
‘Gardenin’,’ he answered.

‘Ronnie was a fighter,’ says one of the men who trained him, ‘the hardest boy I’ve ever seen. To stop him you’d have had to kill him. Reggie was different. It was as if he had all the experience of an old boxer before he started. Just once in a lifetime you find a boy with everything to be a champion. Reggie had it.’

When the twins were in trouble, Rosie always knew. ‘You’re a born devil, Ronnie,’ she would say. ‘You know what those eyebrows of yours mean, meeting in the middle of your forehead?’
‘No, Aunt Rose.’
‘They mean you’re born to hang.’