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.

For someone avowedly admiring a nice quiet house, his voice eroded the quietness a fraction more than Esme liked. But then, she admitted smugly, she brought that on herself. She was a good cook, a good plain cook. Roast and three veg (she soon invited him to share Saturday and Sunday lunches, at no extra charge), egg-and-bacon breakfasts, unless it was two boiled eggs, toast, and marmalade. Variations on meat pasty, a chop, fish of some sort, for his tea. Mr. Shale couldn’t get over it. “Delicious!” most times, before and after the repast. Sometimes he chortled, “Ledicious,” which, since he wasn’t drunk, Esme took to be a joke. She wasn’t good at jokes.

How he rang the changes, lauding the most pedestrian menus... Uncalled for, she considered; he was getting what she made for herself. It didn’t cost that much more than catering for one.

“Scrumptious.” “My goodness, a bloater. We had these at home, haven’t seen one in years, hadn’t thought of them. With bread and butter, just the ticket!” He might have been espying caviar.

“Compliments to the chef.” “After a spread like that, you must let me help with the washing-up.” And so forth and on, all of it patently sincere.

Because he was biddable, a hint-taker, Esme allowed a routine to develop after tea. They’d go into the front room and watch television; they both enjoyed a quiz or a game show, sharing gleeful scorn over the number of ignoramuses and ninnies getting the chance to win absurdly rich prizes. After the nine o’clock news, Esme would say, “I expect you want some time to yourself now,” and Mr. Shale would respond, “Absolutely,” or “Right you are, I am a bit drowsy,” and patter away, taking the used cups to the kitchen. She always made coffee for them, proper coffee, Blue Mountain, freshly ground.

After a time he needed no cue, simply collected the crockery and said goodnight.

Esme came to think so highly of him that she would have done his washing. But Mr. Shale took himself off to the laundrette every Saturday morning, choosing his library books while underpants and socks swirled around, and collecting the week’s supply of shirts from a Chinese laundry. Changed his shirt daily, grubby or not. That had been one of Dad’s yardsticks for a gentleman.

She kept telling herself that it was too good to last. Mr. Shale would unveil or develop new tiresome if not repellent mannerisms, take to drink, or start some hobby — men did — involving hammering and banging, strange smells, Things Left About Downstairs.

Failing that, he might mumble about a hitch at the bank, that infernal computer, and get behind with the rent. Instead, after a year, he said, “Er, about what I’m paying you, Mrs. Huddle...” making her bristle. “All the extra, coffee and that, and you feed me like a lord. I don’t feel right. Let’s round it up to the hundred.”

Astonished, Esme decreed almost gaily, “We shall split the difference, Mr. Shale, and make it ninety.”

The only oddity about him was that Mr. Shale never went anywhere, save work and to town on a Saturday. If friends or family existed, he never visited them and they never called on him. Esme never felt sorry for people, their remedies were in their own hands, yet she experienced a wisp of compassion for David Shale. Silly of her, she conceded. He was well looked after, and contented with small talk and television, reading, and his albums and tweezers — there was a hobby after all: he collected stamps.

Esme shrugged off her concern. She didn’t have much of a life, outsiders would say, yet it suited her perfectly, thank you. Some folk were self-sufficient and her lodger was one of them. She couldn’t deny that being self-sufficient without being wholly alone was... quite pleasant.

Mr. Shale had been with her for two years when the rot set in. In rapid succession he bought a new suit, a pair of unsuitable slacks — floppy, pastel, too young for him — and a yellow tank top, worn over a silly open-neck shirt. She caught him studying himself in mirrors. He failed to understand (men didn’t, for some reason) that growing sideburns drew attention to scanty growth above them.

And he started staying out at night.

Esme Huddle snorted, recognising the signs. A typical man was behaving typically. Pity, for she had nearly accepted him as a companion — not a friend, God forbid, but a human pet requiring just about the same effort and attention as a pedigreed cat.

Neither of them alluded to his conduct, nor acknowledged that a cozy routine had altered. Mr. Shale was implicitly sheepish, somehow, that was all. Diffidently hangdog, despite an occasional unguarded grin while daydreaming. “Makes me feel like his mother,” Esme thought crossly. “As if I cared what he gets up to providing he doesn’t bring his tart back here.”

Unlikely, for David Shale was always home by ten-thirty, conspicuously alone, closer to sulks than his former cheeriness.

Although she didn’t care, as such, Esme assured herself, it was regrettable. “Drat the chap,” she exclaimed one evening. From habit she had ground enough beans for two cups. Sooner than waste the coffee she must drink the lot and be kept awake half the night. No consideration, some people.

It wasn’t as if, she argued for the hundredth time, the wretched man was getting anything out of it. Apart from You Know What, silly devil. Grins or no, he was prevailing downcast lately. Hadn’t touched his stamp album in weeks. She’d had to dust it this morning. And that pitiful array of vitamin pills in his bedside drawer, along with a pamphlet about hair restorers. Twenty pounds for a bottle no bigger than your thumb — and she bet he had sent away for some. Chump!

“It won’t happen again,” Mr. Shale assured his landlady. He eyed her anxiously.

“I’m not your keeper,” Esme snapped. “Got your key, and you’re a grown man.”

“But I was very late, I must have woken you.”

“No must about it, if I’m abed before eleven then I get my eight hours, elephants stampeding wouldn’t wake me,” she lied. And with hardly a pause, “Same old story, all over you when they want your order, but it soon changes.”

He looked so taken aback, even frightened, that she clicked her tongue in annoyance at his slowness. “These eggs are a disgrace. Supposed to be free-range, and you can hardly tell the yolk from the white. Stick a bit of straw in the carton and they think they can get away with anything. I shall give that fellow a piece of my mind.”

“I’m not hungry, Mrs. Huddle.” He grimaced at the double egg cup. “Thanks, all the same. And late, I’m running late for the office.” Mr. Shale bolted.

There was no end to men’s folly and vanity. Dieting now, as if skirt-chasing was not enough. And from the sickly look and other evidence, suffering a morning-after penalty for wasting his money in pubs. She had heard him come in, all right. Tiptoeing about downstairs, floorboards creaking, in and out of the bathroom, cistern growling and swooshing into the small hours. Being sick, she deduced, dirty beast. Nobody would be washing themselves, or clothing, in the handbasin so late and so repeatedly. At least he had locked the front door behind him, saving her going down to do it: She’d listened for the sound of the key.

As for it not happening again, handsome is as handsome does, and so much for men’s promises. That very evening, unprecedentedly, he did not return until past eight o’clock; cod in batter, homemade batter, too, none of your shop-bought rubbish, not to mention the peas and carrots, all ruined...

“I’m really sorry,” he said listlessly, a “please don’t start on me” note in the apology. “I got kept at, at—” The stammer was a fresh development. “—At work. All seen to now. I hope.” The last was to himself.

He was a terrible colour. “I... I think I have a migraine, better turn in early.” Migraine out of a bottle, she jeered silently as he fled.

Next evening she let him get his coat off, change into slippers, wash his hands. (Turning the hall broom cupboard into a downstairs cloakroom had been a worthwhile investment, Esme reminded herself, nearly worth the cost.)

“I’m in the lounge,” she called, for Mr. Shale was making towards the dining room, by training. Breakfast in the kitchen, the dining room for high tea, Esme Huddle knew how to maintain standards.

“The police were here,” she greeted him. “Never had them in the house, then two at once. Plainclothesman... well, I say plain clothes, he was got up like they used to for student rag weeks, with his leather jacket and tennis shoes. Him and a girl PC. That uniform isn’t becoming, she did look dowdy.”

“They came here,” he repeated, final word a squeak. And he looked around, radiating dread.

“No,” said Esme, “this was before lunchtime, why would they wait? Wanted to know where you were on Wednesday night. Here, I said, same as usual. Tea, you watched the quiz with me, some silly comedy show afterwards while we were chatting. Then upstairs to play with your stamps. Your light went out about half-past ten, I noticed that when I went to the bathroom.”

David Shale studied her curiously, lips parted. She sighed impatiently. “That’s what you told them, I expect.”

Still digesting what he had heard, Mr. Shale dithered.

His, “Er, yes, that’s what I told them,” was belated, followed with, “I should have mentioned it, I’m sorry. That’s why I was late yesterday, the police asking me questions. There was a murder, and I must be somebody’s double—”

Esme raised a hand. “There’s enough murder on television and in the papers without talking about it.” She was airing a pet grumble.

Stumbling on regardless, he mumbled, “Not murder, it was... accidental.” Mr. Shale contrived a motionless shiver, implied by his troubled eyes. “Accident, definitely,” he whispered.

Some people wouldn’t listen — what had she just told him about discussing such matters? Raising her voice, Esme rapped, “I dare say.”

And a shade less harshly, immediately breaking her own ban: “What do these women expect, carrying on that way. Promiscuous, the sergeant fellow said. Married woman, and a string of fancy men? I should just about think she was promiscuous.”

David Shale seemed to shrink within himself. Esme smiled grimly. “They didn’t tell you that, what sort she was? A sensible man wouldn’t need telling. Touch tar and you dirty your fingers. There’s a lot of truth in old sayings.”

Flinching, he asked almost inaudibly, “What now?”

“A nice bloater, it’s fish night. Answer or Bust starts in twenty minutes, we must look sharp.”

“No! I mean...” He broke off to smile wryly, bitterly, at his own stupidity. “Money, you’ll be wanting more money.”

Esme Huddle’s ears sang and she willed herself to breathe steadily, riding out a surge of anger. Her voice shook. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

She stood up. “But since we’re speaking plainly — I would stay in of an evening in future, if I were you. All this nonsense when you took to going out... Didn’t do you a scrap of good, not in the long run. There is television and your stamps, you haven’t done your stamps for ages. And three library books, weeks overdue. I keep seeing them upstairs. Thoughtless; sorry to be personal, but it is — others may be waiting for what you can’t be bothered with.”

Esme wanted to laugh at his expression, guarded blankness succeeded by hope, giving way to incredulous gratitude. She experienced a complex pang of half-irritated toleration — men! — and covert amusement at his transparency.

“You’re right,” said a fervent Mr. Shale. He moved to the other room in an awkward, experimental fashion, like a far older man or an invalid. “I must catch up on my reading. Absolutely right, as usual, Mrs. Huddle.”

Adding, with a wan trace of his former, hand-rubbing zeal, “I do believe I could eat something. A bloater is a bloater is a bloater, eh?”

Which reminded her... She might as well get everything settled before they returned to safe ground; there would never be a better time to impose her will. “There is just one thing, Mr. Shale.”

His face registered defeat settling once more. “I thought there might be.”

Esme’s lips tightened. Trust a man to get sarky just because his meal wasn’t ready the minute he walked in. But she kept her voice reasonable. “I wish you wouldn’t make such a to-do about what I put on the table. Nobody ever said I wasn’t a fair cook, for anything plain and wholesome. There’s no need for comments, ‘Thank you’ would do, though I take that for granted. It gets on my nerves a bit, frankly. I know you don’t intend to, but it does.”

There, she had said what she wanted to. If he didn’t like it, he could lump it.

Mr. Shale said wonderingly, “Praising your cooking too much. That’s it?”

“I can’t think of anything else. It probably seems trivial, but we can’t help the way we are. ‘Over-egging the pudding,’ my father called that kind of thing. It’s only plain cooking when all is said and done, and you pay me for it.”

“Good God,” Mr. Shale mouthed dazedly. He struggled for further words, thought better of them, and nodded humbly.

Time would tell, she reflected. A few days later she gave the still-subdued lodger a little test when he sat down to tea, warning briskly, “Mind out, your plate’s very hot.”

Back turned while she reached through the serving hatch for salt and pepper, Esme waited for his once-inevitable rejoinder: “Well, it came from a hot plate, Mrs. Huddle.” But waiting politely for her to sit down before taking up his knife and fork, Mr. Shale spoke not a word.

She felt no sense of victory, though she was gratified to find her character assessment justified. Whatever David Shale had done to that bad woman, he would always behave himself under her roof, not to mention her eye. And he was an undeniably quick learner.