See no evil

When I was at university, Reggie Kray was my penpal. I wrote to him in 1991, asking for an interview for The Word, an Oxford student newspaper. Kray was unavoidably detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. But he sent me a prompt, polite letter back.

‘Thanks for your letter,’ he wrote. ‘I will see you as soon as possible. We only get three visitors a month. Could you send me a copy of The Word?’

I sent him a copy — but I never did get to be among his three monthly visitors before his death in 2000, at the age of 66. Still, I’m ashamed to say, I was thrilled enough just to get a letter from him; and to drink in his wild, scrawling handwriting — three huge, near-illegible words to a line; nine skew-whiff lines to a page of prison-issue foolscap. A graphologist would have had a field day. Was this how deranged murderers always wrote? Or was this what happens to anyone’s handwriting after 20 years in jail?

Either way, the letter satisfied my ghoulish fascination with murderers.