Read Truth Dare Kill for Free Online Page B

some new year celebrations. I knocked again, harder.
    “Wat you want?! We no open, yet. Come back later!” Mary’s high thin voice cut through the door like a dentist drill.
    “Mary, it’s me, Danny. It’s business.”
    I heard nothing for a minute then grumbling and catches being taken off and bolts sliding. Mary’s little round face showed round the crack of the door. She wasn’t wearing make-up. She had no eyebrows. It was a shock to see how old she was. Blessed night-time.
    “Wat you want, Danny? Girls not up. They need beauty sleep. Like me.”
    She did.
    “It’s about these murders, Mary. I need some information.” I was calling in a favour I’d done her a couple of months back. There had been a spate of stealing from the girls’ rooms. Mary thought one of them was the culprit but didn’t want the boys in blue rampaging through her house. I caught the thief on the fire escape round the back; he was the neighbour’s kid. Justice was meted out according to local custom: the kid was given a good hiding and cash changed hands in reparation. The problem stopped.
    She opened the door a little wider. She was in a blue silk dressing gown that fell to her tiny feet. Her hair was tightly held in a net. She looked even shorter today, shrunken. I thought of my mother. “Why you interested, Danny? You private dick, not real Bobby.”
    I smiled at Mary’s sing-song cackle; we suffered the same degree of incomprehension by the English at times.
    “Call it professional curiosity, Mary. Can I come in for a minute.”
    Her eyes narrowed even further, then she stood back and let me in. She glanced outside to see who might have spotted me – the neighbours, and hence the police, didn’t like callers much at any time, far less during the day.
    The familiar smell of incense and cheap perfume hit me like a shovel. I would catch a whiff on my clothes for days after one of my visits. I didn’t come here often, and when I first knocked on Mary’s door it wasn’t so much about the act itself as proving something to myself. They beat the shit out of me in the camp; I wondered what else they might have knocked out.
    Mary was a psychologist. She’d give Doc Thompson a run for his money. She took my measure that first time like a chef inspecting fruit at Covent Garden. She gave me green tea and talked to me, drew out a little of the story, a little of the need. Then she introduced me to Colette, a lippy dyed blonde with a happy heart. A natural at her profession. She told Colette to take her time, no rush.
    I guess it worked as I’ve come back a couple of times since. Mary runs a clean house and it’s only for a wee while, till I can face up to the rejections on the dance floor.
    Besides, I’d also dropped in on Mary on business, my business. I’m new to London, and it’s important in my line to know who the bad guys are and what they’re up to. You don’t want to be crossing anyone important when you’re on the scent. I learned that the hard way when I got mixed up in the affairs of a certain Annie MacGuire whose old man turned out to be making hay with the lady wife of a rival mob leader in the East End.
    Annie was a brazen-haired, big-breasted girl who laughed a lot and wore more jewellery than Hatton Garden. She stormed into my office, bangles clashing like cymbals, demanding that I tail Mr Stanley MacGuire. Stanley seemed to be spending too many nights at the office. Which was tricky; Stanley’s line of work – putting the arm on late payers of the loan shark he worked for – placed his office in the back seat of a big Humber Hawk.
    So I spent a couple of weeks and a lot of shoe leather finding out that Stanley was not so much putting the arm on people as putting it round a certain Laura Dayton, who had the edge on Annie by about ten years and twenty pounds. I didn’t know Miss Dayton was a Mrs and also fooling around. Or that Mr Dayton was well known for his trademark habit of breaking people’s shins with the iron bar he kept up his very big