Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand Page A

wretched little cub reporter that ever nosed his way into a house where he wasn’t wanted. You’re a journalist all right.”
    Tinka began to lose her temper. “Yes, I am a journalist, I don’t make the slightest secret of it. But not that kind of a journalist, you don’t know anything about it or you would know that my kind of paper doesn’t print stories like this, it isn’t interested in them. … And anyway, how could we have known? You say the accident happened abroad, you brought her down here secretly. How could Girls Together have heard anything about it at all? That’s what I work on, a thing called Girls Together , a lot of cute rubbish about how to dress like a film star on four pounds a week, and whether to let your boy kiss you in ‘a nasty way,’ and smart little stories that are really only the old married-her-boss stuff tarted up. How could we possibly have got hold of this accident business—even if we printed real-life stories, which we don’t.”
    “Then why did you come here?” said Carlyon.
    “A girl has been writing to me from this house—I’ve told you a thousand times. A girl who calls herself ‘Amista.’ She told me about the house and about you and Dai and Mrs. Love and even the milk-woman and the plumber who came up to do the drains. … Look, now, surely that’s proof: who could possibly have told me that Dai Jones Ych-y-fi came to do the drains? It would be about four months ago, sometime in the spring it was, I remember.”
    “But you admit that you were talking to him yesterday in the village.”
    “Oh, God!” said Tinka. She slumped back against the sofa pillows. “You don’t believe a word I’m saying, do you?”
    “The thing is utter rubbish. There has never been any girl in this house, except my wife.”
    “Perhaps your wife…”
    “When the drains were attended to,” said Carlyon, “my wife was in a nursing home in London; you can ask Mrs. Love—she was there as a ‘special’ looking after her. The whole thing’s a lie, Miss Jones, from beginning to end.”
    She was defeated. She could send for Amista’s letters, get proof from Miss Let’s-be-Lovely and other people in the office, and lay them all before him with dates and postmarks and all the rest of it. But now was now. “I can only say that whatever you want to believe, I knew nothing about your story, I never dreamed of bringing a lot of publicity down on you, making a drama of it all.” She looked up at him piteously. The round face, usually so insouciant and gay, was tear-stained into little bumpy patches, the freckled nose was polished with much rubbing, wet eyelashes stuck together in little starry points. “Surely you don’t believe—surely, after we sat in the rain yesterday afternoon, talking so—so friendlily , surely you can’t go on believing that I would be so cruel and heartless as to do her any harm. Surely you must have known that I was—well, sincere!”
    Carlyon’s blue eyes softened for a moment, looking down at her woebegone face. But he thrust his hands deeper into the pockets of the shabby tweed coat. “Charm is a dangerous thing, my dear Miss Jones. It takes all sorts of guises—it isn’t just being gushing in the right way, being brilliant, being amusing, looking nice. The dangerous part about it is that, whatever form it takes, it always does seem ‘sincere.’ In some mysterious way, your professional charmer always is sincere—even when he least means it. That’s the essential magic of the thing.”
    “I must say,” said Tinka, bitterly, “that Katinka Jones in the role of professional charmer is something that will have my pals in Fleet Street rolling in the aisles.”
    “All journalists are professional charmers,” said Carlyon. “It’s part of their stock in trade. Add an air of jolly-friendliness-sitting-on-a-rock-in-the-rain and you’re top of the class.”
    “Or a rainbow,” said Tinka.
    For a moment he looked as though she had hit him across