Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995
The Taker of Hints
by Jeffry Scott
As a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail, Jeffry Scott traveled widely and reported some of the most dramatic stories of the day, including the Jonestown cult mass-suicides in Guyana. In his fiction, however, he mostly stays close to home and shows as fine a sense as anyone of the possibilities for crime in the domestic niche...
The only diverting, smile-inducing thing about her — not that she had ever seen humour in it — was her name. That apart, Esme Huddle was quiet, practical, sardonic; unfrivolous enough to be mistaken for dour.
She and men did not agree. It wasn’t a violent dislike on either side, but Esme and males had never quite hit it off. She was prepared to concede being the loser by that, since most women seemed to value a partnership of some kind, but there you were.
Courted in her youth, Esme had tended to lose patience with suitors’ posturing and moodiness. Fellows talked such a lot, half or more of it rubbish.
In turn, Archie and Gerald and Tim turned moody when she refused to let them “take liberties” — and they had struck her as amiable enough, initially. If they were the cream of the crop, it did not bode well for the rest, but still she wed Peter Huddle. Mainly because he was docile, promisingly terse, and kept asking her. Esme didn’t like marriage much, asking herself why romantic novelists made such a fuss about the whole thing. Once her curiosity was satisfied, sex seemed messy and repetitive. After certain patient years Mr. Huddle came to share her opinion, visiting his mother for the weekend and never returning. Their divorce was painless.
Esme kept the house in Chinnery Gardens, buying her ex-husband’s half by monthly installments. While her job as technical librarian with an engineering company was not particularly well paid, she spent little on clothes, less on cosmetics, and never took holidays. The wolf was far from the door.
Her parents died, as elderly folk will. Esme got their house and her father’s business, so the wolf retired to the horizon. So too did Esme, though only from the technical library to Chinnery Gardens.
Her father’s off-license shop, selling beer, wines, and spirits to take away, was not in the best trading neighbourhood but it would get no worse. Esme interviewed the manager, whom her father had recruited the previous year, listening patiently before setting him straight.
“You’ll take money at my expense unless I sack you and run this place myself, and I don’t want to do that. No, let me finish. Salesmen bribe you and I dare say you know somebody who knows somebody who supplies stock that’s fallen off the back of a lorry, and the profit on that is all yours. Then there’s playing tunes on the cash register.” Esme suspected that the register was his golden goose, if only because he had enthused over it being state of the art, and uncheatable.
“I’ve never been talked to this way,” he faltered.
Restraining an impulse to point out that there is always a first time, she said, “We’ll take that as read and get on quicker.” Esme wrote a figure on a piece of paper and passed it to him.
“That’s the minimum I want each and every week. Anything over is yours. If it’s less for more than two weeks running, out you go. Mr. Goodbody looks after my tax business, he will be in touch, all your paperwork goes to him. He catches you out, it’s your funeral. Good afternoon.”
Between the shop income — the manager’s fail-safe total was revised upwards periodically, in line with the economy — and capital gained from selling her parents’ house, Esme Huddle was comfortably off.
Thanks to inflation and rising taxation, a little less so by the time she was fifty, however. If she did not buy much or often, she purchased the best: good furniture, good ingredients for simple meals cooked twice a day, a good audio system costing nearly as much as a modest family car. The exterior of her house had to be painted every three years; Peter Huddle had scoffed at her insistence on this but Esme didn’t care. You just had to have that done, standing over workmen to ensure that they burnt the old paint off instead of slapping more over the previous stuff — else something dreadful would happen.
There came a time when she began to recognise telltale envelopes. Esme neither allowed their mere arrival to spoil breakfast nor postponed opening them. That wasn’t her style. But bank and building society statements earned her farsighted concern. It wasn’t a crisis, not even a problem yet. It never would be, were she prepared to sell the house and retrench to a studio flat. All the same...
At that stage a solution presented itself. Esme attended a midweek gathering of the Civic Society, enjoying a slides-illustrated talk on Georgian buildings, rare as unicorns in her outer-London suburb. It was such a nice afternoon that she took the long way home, glancing idly into the shops along Normandy Parade. Then she retraced her steps. The newsagent displayed handwritten advertisements in a corner of his window.
“LODGINGS FOR SINGLE WOMAN, £70 P.W.” “ROOM, BUSINESS LADY ONLY, £75 P.W.” “CLEAN, NEAT (underlined) NONSMOKING (underlined twice) LODGER INVITED, TWO MINS STATION AND BUSES, TERMS BY AGREEMENT.” “THIRD WOMAN FOR SMALL BUT LOVELY HOUSE, SALON-GRADE HAIR DRYER AND SATELLITE TV, £250 PER MONTH.” Esme raised her eyebrows and — she retained a shred of the tomboy — whistled softly.
Her house had three bedrooms. By rearranging furniture and selling one bed, she could produce a bedroom and a private sitting room. Priced at... no call to be greedy, say £85 a week, throw in cooked breakfast and high tea. Fiver a week discount for cash, then accountant Goodbody and the Inland Revenue need not bother their heads over the matter. Some four thousand pounds a year, off the books, untaxed. It bore thinking about.
Her lodger must not be female. They could be worse than men under your roof — more territorial, given to hatching grievances, chattering, and she could envisage clammy tights left to dry in the bathroom. Esme’s paying guest would be a man.
Actually she wouldn’t mind a bit of company. In moderation, on her terms. Men might be, indeed were, men, but a lodger seemed different. More manageable; neutered, somehow.
David Shale could have been created by order for Esme Huddle.
Not timid, she couldn’t abide wishy-washy men, and not the other way; she had no time for those who were overbearing or aspired to be. Mr. Shale, fortyish, sandyish, plumply unthreatening as the dormouse which his round, liquid eyes evoked, satisfied her. He was a bookkeeper at a plastics factory only a mile from Chinnery Gardens, and proved almost embarrassingly grateful to get “my own little corner in such a nice, quiet house — parlour to myself, right across the landing. I have struck lucky.”
That gave Esme pause. In her experience, or rather, received knowledge from her dad, and he’d been no fool, effusive strangers had to be watched. But it was just David Shale’s way, he could not help being appreciative.
Further, although Esme believed that no man could be sensitive, Mr. Shale was quick on the uptake, receptive to hints. The second evening, finishing tea, he cleared his throat, showed signs of confiding in her, and began, “I’m divorced, you know—”
“I expect so,” she countered sharply, forbiddingly. Changing tack to say that it had smelled of a frost on his way home, he never revived the subject. Really, Esme congratulated herself, apart from the cooking, which she would have done for herself in any case, he was no trouble. Yet she did have a minor reservation about the paying guest.