Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

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...

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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.