CHAPTER NINE
THE WIND MUST COME FROM SOMEWHERE

THEY DROVE out of the village in Mma Ramotswe's tiny white van. The dirt road was rough, virtually disappearing at points into deep potholes or rippling into a sea of corrugations that made the van creak and rattle in protest. The farm was only eight miles away from the village, but they made slow progress, and Mma Ramotswe was relieved to have Mma Pot-sane with her. It would be easy to get lost in the featureless bush, with no hills to guide one and each tree looking much like the next one. Though for Mma Potsane the landscape, even if dimly glimpsed, was rich in associations. Her eyes squeezed almost shut, she peered out of the van, pointing out the place where they had found a stray donkey years before, and there, by that rock, that was where a cow had died for no apparent reason. These were the intimate memories that made the land alive-that bound people to a stretch of baked earth, as valuable to them, and as beautiful, as if it were covered with sweet grass.
Mma Potsane sat forward in her seat. "There," she said. "Do you see it over there? I can see things better if they are far away. I can see it now."
Mma Ramotswe followed her gaze. The bush had become denser, thick with thorn trees, and these concealed, but not quite obscured, the shape of the buildings. Some of these were typical of the ruins to be found in southern Africa; whitewashed walls that seemed to have crumbled until they were a few feet above the ground, as if flattened from above; others still had their roofs, or the framework of their roofs, the thatch having collapsed inwards, consumed by ants or taken by birds for nests.
"That is the farm?"
"Yes. And over there-do you see over there?-that is where we lived."
It was a sad homecoming for Mma Potsane, as she had warned Mma Ramotswe; this was where she had spent that quiet time with her husband after he had spent all those years away in the mines in South Africa. Their children grown up, they had been thrown back on each other's company and enjoyed the luxury of an uneventful life.
"We did not have much to do," she said. "My husband went every day to work in the fields. I sat with the other women and made clothes. The German liked us to make clothes, which he would sell in Gaborone."
The road petered out, and Mma Ramotswe brought the van to a halt under a tree. Stretching her legs, she looked through the trees at the building which must have been the main house. There must have been eleven or twelve houses at one time, judging from the ruins scattered about. It was so sad, she thought; all these buildings set down in the middle of the bush like this; all that hope, and now, all that remained were the mud foundations and the crumbling walls.
They walked over to the main house. Much of the roof had survived, as it, unlike the others, had been made of corrugated iron. There were doors too, old gauze-screened doors hanging off their jambs, and glass in some of the windows.
"That is where the German lived," said Mma Potsane. "And the American and the South African woman, and some other people from far away. We Batswana lived over there."
Mma Ramotswe nodded. "I should like to go inside that house."
Mma Potsane shook her head. "There will be nothing," she said. "The house is empty. Everybody has gone away."
I know that. But now that we have come out here, I should like to see what it is like inside. You don't need to go in if you don't want to."
Mma Potsane winced. "I cannot let you go in by yourself," she muttered. "I shall come in with you."
They pushed at the screen which blocked the front doorway. The wood had been mined by termites, and it gave way at a touch.
"The ants will eat everything in this country," said Mma Pot-sane. "One day only the ants will be left. They will have eaten everything else."
They entered the house, feeling straightaway the cool that came with being out of the sun. There was a smell of dust in the air, the acrid mixed odour of the destroyed ceiling board and the creosote-impregnated timbers that had repelled the ants.
Mma Potsane gestured about the room in which they were standing. "You see. There is nothing here. It is just an empty house. We can leave now."
Mma Ramotswe ignored the suggestion. She was studying a piece of yellowing paper which had been pinned to a wall. It was a newspaper photograph-a picture of a man standing in front of a building. There had been a printed caption, but the paper had rotted and it was illegible. She beckoned for Mma Potsane to join her.
"Who is this man?"
Mma Potsane peered at the photograph, holding it close to her eyes. "I remember that man," she said. "He worked here too. He is a Motswana. He was very friendly with the American. They used to spend all their time talking, talking, like two old men at a kgotla."
"Was he from the village?" asked Mma Ramotswe.
Mma Potsane laughed. "No, he wasn't one of us. He was from Francistown. His father was headmaster there and he was a very clever man. This one too, the son; he was very clever. He knew many things. That was why the American was always talking to him. The German didn't like him, though. Those two were not friends."
Mma Ramotswe studied the photograph, and then gently took it off the wall and tucked it into her pocket. Mma Potsane had moved away, and she joined her, peering into the next room. Here, on the floor, there lay the skeleton of a large bird, trapped in the house and unable to get out. The bones lay where the bird must have fallen, picked clean by ants.
"This was the room they used as an office," said Mma Potsane. "They kept all the receipts and they had a small safe over there, in that corner. People sent them money, you know.
There were people in other countries who thought that this place was important. They believed that it could show that dry places like this could be changed. They wanted us to show that people could live together in a place like this and share everything."
Mma Ramotswe nodded. She was familiar with people who liked to test out all sorts of theories about how people might live. There was something about the country that attracted them, as if in that vast, dry country there was enough air for new ideas to breathe. Such people had been excited when the Brigade movement had been set up. They had thought it a very good idea that young people should be asked to spend time working for others and helping to build their country; but what was so exceptional about that? Did young people not work in rich countries? Perhaps they did not, and that is why these people, who came from such countries, should have found the whole idea so exciting. There was nothing wrong with these people-they were kind people usually, and treated the Batswana with respect. Yet somehow it could be tiring to be given advice. There was always some eager foreign organisation ready to say to Africans: this is what you do, this is how you should do things. The advice may be good, and it might work elsewhere, but Africa needed its own solutions.
This farm was yet another example of one of these schemes that did not work out. You could not grow vegetables in the Kalahari. That was all there was to it. There were many things that could grow in a place like this, but these were things that belonged here. They were not like tomatoes and lettuces. They did not belong in Botswana, or at least not in this part of it.
They left the office and wandered through the rest of the house. Several of the rooms were open to the sky, and the floors in these rooms were covered in leaves and twigs. Lizards darted for cover, rustling the leaves, and tiny, pink and white geckoes froze where they clung to the walls, taken aback by the totally unfamiliar intrusion. Lizards; geckoes; the dust in the air; this was all it was-an empty house. Save for the photograph.

MMA POTSANE was pleased once they were out again, and suggested that she show Mma Ramotswe the place where the vegetables had been grown. Again, the land had reasserted itself, and all that remained to show of the scheme was a pattern of wandering ditches, now eroded into tiny canyons. Here and there, it was possible to see where the wooden poles supporting the shade-netting had been erected, but there was no trace of the wood itself, which, like everything else, had been consumed by the ants.
Mma Ramotswe shaded her eyes with a hand.
"All that work," she mused. "And now this."
Mma Potsane shrugged her shoulders. "But that is always true, Mma," she said. "Even Gaborone. Look at all those buildings. How do we know that Gaborone will still be there in fifty years' time? Have the ants not got their plans for Gaborone as well?"
Mma Ramotswe smiled. It was a good way of putting it. All our human endeavours are like that, she reflected, and it is only because we are too ignorant to realize it, or are too forgetful to remember it, that we have the confidence to build something that is meant to last. Would the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency be remembered in twenty years' time? Or Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors? Probably not, but then did it matter all that much?
The melancholy thought prompted her to remember. She was not here to dream about archaeology but to try to find out something about what happened all those years ago. She had come to read a place, and had found that there was nothing, or almost nothing, to be read. It was as if the wind had come and rubbed it all out, scattering the pages, covering the footsteps with dust.
She turned to Mma Potsane, who was silent beside her.
"Where does the wind come from, Mma Potsane?"
The other woman touched her cheek, in a gesture which Mma Ramotswe did not understand. Her eyes looked empty, Mma Ramotswe thought; one had dulled, and was slightly milky; she should go to a clinic.
"Over there," said Mma Potsane, pointing out to the thorn trees and the long expanse of sky, to the Kalahari. "Over there."
Mma Ramotswe said nothing. She was very close, she felt, to understanding what had happened, but she could not express it, and she could not tell why she knew.

CHAPTER TEN
CHILDREN ARE GOOD FOR BOTSWANA

MR J.L.B. Matekoni's bad-tempered maid was slouching at the kitchen door, her battered red hat at a careless, angry angle. Her mood had become worse since her employer had revealed his unsettling news, and her waking hours had been spent in contemplating how she might avert catastrophe. The arrangement which she had with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni suited her very well. There was not a great deal of work to do; men never worried about cleaning and polishing, and provided they were well fed they were very untroublesome employers. And she did feed Mr J.L.B. Matekoni well, no matter what that fat woman might be saying to the contrary. She had said that he was too thin! Thin by her standards perhaps, but quite well built by the standards of any normal people. She could just imagine what she had in store for him-spoonfuls of lard for breakfast and thick slices of bread, which would puff him up like that fat chief from the north, the one who broke the chair when he went to visit the house where her cousin worked as a maid.
But it was not so much the welfare of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni that concerned her, it was her own threatened position. If she had to go off and work in a hotel she would not be able to entertain her men friends in that same way. Under the current arrangement, men were able to visit her in the house while her employer was at work-without his knowledge, of course- and they were able to go into Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's room where there was the large double bed which he had bought from Central Furnishers. It was very comfortable-wasted on a bachelor, really-and the men liked it. They gave her presents of money, and the gifts were always better if they were able to spend time together in Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's room. That would all come to an end if anything changed.
The maid frowned. The situation was serious enough to merit desperate action, but it was hard to see what she could do. There was no point trying to reason with him; once a woman like that had sunk her claws into a man then there would be no turning him back. Men became quite unreasonable in such circumstances and he simply would not listen to her if she tried to tell him of the dangers that lay ahead. Even if she found out something about that woman-something about her past-he would probably pay no attention to the disclosure. She imagined confronting Mr J.L.B. Matekoni with the information that his future wife was a murderess! That woman has already killed two husbands, she might say. She put something in their food. The are both dead now because of her.
But he would say nothing, and just smile. I do not believe you, he would retort; and he would continue to say that even if she waved the headlines from the Botswana Daily News: Mma Ramotswe murders husband with poison. Police take porridge away and do tests. Porridge found to he full of poison. No, he would not believe it.
She spat into the dust. If there was nothing that she could do to get him to change his mind, then perhaps she had better think about some way of dealing with Mma Ramotswe. If Mma Ramotswe were simply not there, then the problem would have been solved, if she could . . . No, it was a terrible thing to think, and then she probably would not be able to afford to hire a witch doctor. They were very expensive when it came to removing people, and it was far too risky anyway. People talked, and the police would come round, and she could imagine nothing worse than going to prison.
Prison! What if Mma Ramotswe were to be sent to prison for a few years'? You can't marry somebody who is in prison, and they can't marry you. So if Mma Ramotswe were to be found to have committed a crime and be sent off for a few years, then all would stay exactly as it was. And did it really matter if she had not actually committed a crime, as long as the police thought that she had and they were able to find the evidence? She had heard once of how a man had been sent off to prison because his enemies had planted ammunition in his house and had informed the police that he was storing it for guerillas. That was back in the days of the Zimbabwe war, when Mr Nkomo had his men near Francistown and bullets and guns were coming into the country no matter how hard the police tried to stop them. The man had protested his innocence, but the police had just laughed, and the magistrate had laughed too.
There were few bullets and guns these days, but it might still be possible to find something that could be hidden in her house. What did the police look for these days? They were very worried about drugs, she believed, and the newspapers sometimes wrote about this person or that person being arrested for trading in dagga. But they had to have a large amount before the police were interested and where would she be able to lay her hands on that? Dagga was expensive and she could probably afford no more than a few leaves. So it would have to be something else.
The maid thought. A fly had landed on her forehead and was crawling down the ridge of her nose. Normally she would have brushed it away, but a thought had crossed her mind and it was developing deliciously. The fly was ignored: a dog barked in the neighbouring garden; a truck changed gear noisily on the road to the old airstrip. The maid smiled, and pushed her hat back. One of her men friends could help her. She knew what he did, and she knew that it was dangerous. He could deal with Mma Ramotswe, and in return she would give him those attentions which he so clearly enjoyed but which were denied him at home. Everybody would be happy. He would get what he wanted. She would save her job. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would be saved from a predatory woman, and Mma Ramotswe would get her just deserts. It was all very clear.

THE MAID returned to the kitchen and started to peel some potatoes. Now that the threat posed by Mma Ramotswe was receding-or shortly would-she felt quite positively disposed towards her wayward employer, who was just weak, like all men. She would cook him a fine lunch today. There was meat in the fridge-meat which she had earlier planned to take home with her, but which she would now fry up for him with a couple of onions and a good helping of mashed potatoes.
The meal was not quite ready when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni came home. She heard his truck and the sound of the gate slamming, and then the door opening. He usually called out when he came back-a simple "I'm home now" to let her know that she could put his lunch on the table. Today, though, there was no shout; instead, there was the sound of another voice. She caught her breath. The thought occurred to her that he might have come home with that woman, having asked her to lunch. In that case, she would hurriedly hide the stew and say that there was no food in the house. She could not bear the thought of Mma Ramotswe eating her food; she would rather feed it to a dog than lay it before the woman who had threatened her livelihood.
She moved towards the kitchen door and peered down the corridor. Just inside the front door, holding it open to let somebody follow him into the house, was Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "Careful," he said. "This door is not very wide." Another voice answered, but she did not hear what it said. It was a female voice but not, she realised with a rush of relief, the voice of that terrible woman. Who was he bringing back to the house? Another woman? That would be good, because then she could tell that Ramotswe woman that he was not faithful to her and that might put an end to the marriage before it started.
But then the wheelchair came in and she saw the girl, pushed by her small brother, enter the house. She was at a loss what to think. What was her employer doing bringing these children into the house? They must be relatives; the children of some distant cousin. The old Botswana morality dictated that you had to provide for such people, no matter how distant the connection.
"I am here, Rra," she called out. "Your lunch is ready."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked up. "Ah," he said. "There are some children with me. They will need to eat."
"There will be enough," she called out. "I have made a good stew."
She waited a few minutes before going into the living room, busying herself with the mashing of the overcooked potatoes. When she did go though, wiping her hands industriously on a kitchen rag, she found Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sitting in his chair. On the other side of the room, looking out of the window, was a girl, with a young boy, presumably her brother, standing beside her. The maid stared at the children, taking in at a glance what sort of children they were. Basarwa, she thought: unmistakable. The girl had that colour skin, the light brown, the colour of cattle dung; the boy had those eyes that those people have, a bit like Chinese eyes, and his buttocks stuck out in a little shelf behind him.
"These children have come to live here," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, lowering his eyes as he spoke. "They are from the orphan farm, but I am going to be looking after them."
The maid's eyes widened. She had not expected this. Masarwa children being brought into an ordinary person's house and allowed to live there was something no self-respecting person would do. These people were thieves-she never doubted that-and they should not be encouraged to come and live in respectable Batswana houses. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni may be trying to be kind, but there were limits to charity.
She stared at her employer. "They are staying here? For how many days?"
He did not look up at her. He was too ashamed, she thought.
"They are staying here for a long time. I am not planning to take them back."
She was silent. She wondered whether this had something to do with that Ramotswe woman. She might have decided that the children could come and stay as part of her programme to take over his life. First you move in some Masarwa children, and then you move in yourself. The moving in of the children may even have been part of a plot against herself, of course. Mma Ramotswe might well have expected that she would not approve of such children coming into the house and in this way she might force her out even before she moved in altogether. Well, if that was her plan, then she would do everything in her power to thwart it. She would show her that she liked these children and that she was happy to have them in the house. It would be difficult, but she could do it.
"You will be hungry," she said to the girl, smiling as she spoke. "I have some good stew. It is just what children like."
The girl returned the smile. "Thank you, Mma," she said respectfully. "You are very kind."
The boy said nothing. He was looking at the maid with those disconcerting eyes, and it made her shudder inwardly. She returned to the kitchen and prepared the plates. She gave the girl a good helping, and there was plenty for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. But to the boy she gave only a small amount of stew, and covered most of that with the scrapings from the potato pot. She did not want to encourage that child, and the less he had to eat the better.
The meal was taken in silence. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sat at the head of the table, with the girl at his right and the boy at the other end. The girl had to lean forward in her chair to eat, as the table was so constructed that the wheelchair would not fit underneath it. But she managed well enough, and soon finished her helping. The boy wolfed down his food and then sat with his hands politely clasped together, watching Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
Afterwards, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni went out to the truck and fetched the suitcase which they had brought from the orphan farm. The housemother had issued them with extra clothes and these had been placed in one of the cheap brown cardboard suitcases which the orphans were given when they went out into the world. There was a small, typed list taped to the top of the case, and this listed the clothes issued under two columns. Boy: 2 pairs boys' pants, 2 pairs khaki shorts, 2 khaki shirts, 1 jersey, 4 socks, 1 pair shoes, 1 Setswana Bible. Girl: 3 pairs girls' pants, 2 shirts, 1 vest, 2 skirts, 4 socks, 1 pair shoes, 1 Setswana Bible.
He took the suitcase inside and showed the children to the room they were to occupy, the small room he had kept for the visitors who never seemed to arrive, the room with two mattresses, a small pile of dusty blankets, and a chair. He placed the suitcase on the chair and opened it. The girl wheeled herself over to the chair and looked in at the clothes, which were new. She reached forward and touched them hesitantly, lovingly, as one would who had never before possessed new clothes.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni left them to unpack. Going out into the garden, he stood for a moment under his shade-netting by the front door. He knew that he had done something momentous in bringing the children to the house, and now the full immensity of his action came home to him. He had changed the course of the lives of two other people and now everything that happened to them would be his responsibility. For a moment he felt appalled by the thought. Not only were there two extra mouths to feed, but there were schools to think about, and a woman to look after their day-to-day needs. He would have to find a nursemaid-a man could never do all the things that children need to have done for them. Some sort of housemother, rather like the housemother who had looked after them at the orphan farm. He stopped. He had forgotten. He was almost a married man. Mma Ramotswe would be mother to these children.
He sat down heavily on an upturned petrol drum. These children were Mma Ramotswe's responsibility now, and he had not even asked her opinion. He had allowed himself to be bamboozled into taking them by that persuasive Mma Potok-wane, and he had hardly thought out all the implications. Could he take them back? She could hardly refuse to receive them as they were still, presumably, her legal responsibility. Nothing had been signed; there were no pieces of paper which could be waved in his face. But to take them back was unthinkable. He had told the children that he would look after them, and that, in his mind, was more important than any signature on a legal document.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had never broken his word. He had made it a rule of his business life that he would never tell a customer something and then not stick to what he had said. Sometimes this had cost him dearly. If he told a customer that a repair to a car would cost three hundred pula, then he would never charge more than that, even if he discovered that the work took far longer. And often it did take longer, with those lazy apprentices of his taking hours to do even the simplest thing. He could not understand how it would be possible to take three hours to do a simple service on a car. All you had to do was to drain the old oil and pour it into the dirty oil container. Then you put in fresh oil, changed the oil filters, checked the brake fluid level, adjusted the timing, and greased the gearbox. That was the simple service, which cost two hundred and eighty pula. It could be done in an hour and a half at the most, but the apprentices managed to take much longer.
No, he could not go back on the assurance he had given those children. They were his children, come what may. He would talk to Mma Ramotswe and explain to her that children were good for Botswana and that they should do what they could to help these poor children who had no people of their own. She was a good woman, he knew, and he was sure that she would understand and agree with him. Yes, he would do it, but perhaps not just yet.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE GLASS CEILING

MMA MAKUTSI, Secretary of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and cum laude graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College, sat at her desk, staring out through the open door. She preferred to leave the door open when there was nothing happening in the agency (which was most of the time), but it had its drawbacks, as the chickens would sometimes wander in and strut about as if they were in a henhouse. She did not like these chickens, for a number of very sound reasons. To begin with, there was something unprofessional about having chickens in a detective agency, and then, quite apart from that, the chickens themselves irritated her profoundly. It was always the same group of chickens: four hens and a dispirited and, she imagined, impotent rooster, who was kept on by the hens out of charity. The rooster was lame and had lost a large proportion of the feathers on one of his wings. He looked defeated, as if he were only too well aware of his loss of status, and he always walked several steps behind the hens themselves, like a royal consort relegated by protocol into a permanent second place.
The hens seemed equally irritated by Mma Makutsi's presence. It was as if she, rather than they, were the intruder. By rights, this tiny building with its two small windows and its creaky door should be a henhouse, not a detective agency. If they outstared her, perhaps, she would go, and they would be left to perch on the chairs and make their nests in the filing cabinets. That is what the chickens wanted.
"Get out," said Mma Makutsi, waving a folded-up newspaper at them. "No chickens here! Get out!"
The largest of the hens turned and glared at her, while the rooster merely looked shifty.
"I mean you!" shouted Mma Makutsi. "This is not a chicken farm. Out!"
The hens uttered an indignant clucking and seemed to hesitate for a moment. But when Mma Makutsi pushed her chair back and made to get up, they turned and began to move towards the door, the rooster in the lead this time, limping awkwardly.
The chickens dealt with, Mma Makutsi resumed her staring out of the door. She resented the indignity of having to shoo chickens out of one's office. How many first-class graduates of the Botswana Secretarial College had to do that? she wondered. There were offices in town-large buildings with wide windows and air-conditioning units where the secretaries sat at polished desks with chrome handles. She had seen these offices when the college had taken them for work-experience visits. She had seen them sitting there, smiling, wearing expensive earrings and waiting for a well-paid husband to step forward and ask them to marry him. She had thought at the time that she would like a job like that, although she herself would be more interested in the work than in the husband. She had assumed, in fact, that such a job would be hers, but when the course had finished and they had all gone off for interviews, she had received no offers. She could not understand why this should be so. Some of the other women who got very much worse marks than she did-sometimes as low as 51 percent (the barest of passes) received good offers whereas she (who had achieved the almost inconceivable mark of 97 percent) received nothing. How could this be?
It was one of the other unsuccessful girls who explained it to her. She, too, had gone to interviews and been unlucky.
"It is men who give out these jobs, am I right?" she had said.
"I suppose so," said Mma Makutsi. "Men run these businesses. They choose the secretaries."
"So how do you think men choose who should get the job and who shouldn't? Do you think they choose by the marks we got? Is that how you think they do it?"
Mma Makutsi was silent. It had never occurred to her that decisions of this nature would be made on any other basis. Everything that she had been taught at school had conveyed the message that hard work helped you to get a good job.
"Well," said her friend, smiling wryly, "I can tell that you do think that. And you're wrong. Men choose women for jobs on the basis of their looks. They choose the beautiful ones and give them jobs. To the others, they say: 'We are very sorry. All the jobs have gone. We are very sorry. There is a world recession, and in a world recession there are only enough jobs for beautiful girls. That is the effect of a world recession. It is all economics.'"
Mma Makutsi had listened in astonishment. But she knew, even as the bitter remarks were uttered, that they were true. Perhaps she had known all along, at a subconscious level, and had simply not faced up to the fact. Good-looking women got what they wanted and women like her, who were perhaps not so elegant as the others, were left with nothing.
That evening she looked in the mirror. She had tried to do something about her hair, but had failed. She had applied hair-straightener and had pulled and tugged at it, but it had remained completely uncooperative. And her skin, too, had resisted the creams that she had applied to it, with the result that her complexion was far darker than that of almost every other girl at the college. She felt a flush of resentment at her fate. It was hopeless. Even with those large round glasses she had bought herself, at such crippling expense, she could not disguise the fact that she was a dark girl in a world where light-coloured girls with heavily applied red lipstick had everything at their disposal. That was the ultimate, inescapable truth that no amount of wishful thinking, no amount of expensive creams and lotions, could change. The fun in this life, the good jobs, the rich husbands, were not a matter of merit and hard work, but were a matter of brute, unshifting biology.
Mma Makutsi stood before the mirror and cried. She had worked and worked for her 97 percent at the Botswana Secretarial College, but she might as well have spent her time having fun and going out with boys, for all the good that it had done her. Would there be a job at all, or would she stay at home helping her mother to wash and iron her younger brothers' khaki pants
The question was answered the next day when she applied for and was given the job of Mma Ramotswe's secretary. Here was the solution. If men refused to appoint on merit, then go for a job with a woman. It may not be a glamorous office, but it was certainly an exciting thing to be. To be secretary to a private detective was infinitely more prestigious than to be a secretary in a bank or in a lawyer's office. So perhaps there was some justice after all. Perhaps all that work had been worthwhile after all.
But there was still this problem with the chickens.

"SO, MMA Makutsi," said Mma Ramotswe, as she settled herself down in her chair in anticipation of the pot of bush tea which her secretary was brewing for her. "So I went off to Molepolole and found the place where those people lived. I saw the farmhouse and the place where they tried to grow the vegetables. I spoke to a woman who had lived there at the time. I saw everything there was to see."
"And you found something?" asked Mma Makutsi, as she poured the hot water into the old enamel teapot and swirled it around with the tea leaves.
"I found a feeling," said Mma Ramotswe. "I felt that I knew something."
Mma Makutsi listened to her employer. What did she mean by saying that she felt she knew something? Either you know something or you don't. You can't think that you might know something, if you didn't actually know what it was that you were meant to know.
"I am not sure . . ." she began.
Mma Ramotswe laughed. "It's called an intuition. You can read about it in Mr Andersen's book. He talks about intuitions. They tell us things that we know deep inside, but which we can't find the word for."
"And this intuition you felt at that place," said Mma Makutsi hesitantly. "What did it tell you? Where this poor American boy was?"
"There," said Mma Ramotswe quietly. "That young man is there. "
For a moment they were both silent. Mma Makutsi lowered the teapot onto the formica tabletop and replaced the lid.
"He is living out there? Still?"
"No," said Mma Ramotswe. "He is dead. But he is there Do you know what I am talking about?"
Mma Makutsi nodded. She knew. Any sensitive person in Africa would know what Mma Ramotswe meant. When we die, we do not leave the place we were in when we were alive. We are still there, in a sense; our spirit is there. It never goes away. This was something which white people simply did not understand. They called it superstition, and said that it was a sign of ignorance to believe in such things. But they were the ones who were ignorant. If they could not understand how we are part of the natural world about us, then they are the ones who have closed eyes, not us.
Mma Makutsi poured the tea and handed Mma Ramotswe her mug.
"Are you going to tell the American woman this?" she asked "Surely she will say: 'Where is the body? Show me the exact place where my son is.' You know how these people think She will not understand you if you say that he is there somewhere but you cannot point to the spot."
Mma Ramotswe raised the mug to her lips, watching her secretary as she spoke. This was an astute woman, she thought. She understood exactly how the American woman would think, and she appreciated just how difficult it could be to convey these subtle truths to one who conceived of the world as being entirely explicable by science. The Americans were very clever; they sent rockets into space and invented machines which could think more quickly than any human being alive, but all this cleverness could also make them blind. They did not understand other people. They thought that everyone looked at things in the same way as Americans did, but they were wrong. Science was only part of the truth. There were also many other things that made the world what it was, and the Americans often failed to notice these things, although they were there all the time, under their noses.
Mma Ramotswe put down her mug of tea and reached into the pocket of her dress.
"I also found this," she said, extracting the folded newspaper photograph and passing it to her secretary. Mma Makutsi unfolded the piece of paper and smoothed it out on the surface of her desk. She gazed at it for a few moments before looking up at Mma Ramotswe.
"This is very old," she said. "Was it lying there?"
"No. It was on the wall. There were still some papers pinned on a wall. The ants had missed them."
Mma Makutsi returned her gaze to the paper.
"There are names," she said. "Cephas Kalumani. Oswald Ranta. Mma Soloi. Who are these people?"
"They lived there," said Mma Ramotswe. "They must have been there at the time."
Mma Makutsi shrugged her shoulders. "But even if we could find these people and talk to them," she said, "would that make any difference? The police must have talked to them at the time. Maybe even Mma Curtin talked to them herself when she first came back."
Mma Ramotswe nodded her head in agreement. "You're right," she said. "But that photograph tells me something. Look at the faces."
Mma Makutsi studied the yellowing image. There were two men in the front, standing next to a woman. Behind them was another man, his face indistinct, and a woman, whose back was half-turned. The names in the caption referred to the three in the front. Cephas Kalumani was a tall man, with slightly gangly limbs, a man who would look awkward and ill at ease in any photograph. Mma Soloi, who was standing next to him, was beaming with pleasure. She was a comfortable woman-the archetypical, hardworking Motswana woman, the sort of woman who supported a large family, whose life's labour, it seemed, would be devoted to endless, uncomplaining cleaning: cleaning the yard, cleaning the house, cleaning children. This was a picture of a heroine; unacknowledged, but a heroine nonetheless.
The third figure, Oswald Ranta, was another matter altogether. He was a well-dressed, dapper figure. He was wearing a white shirt and tie and, like Mma Soloi, was smiling at the camera. His smile, though, was very different.
"Look at that man," said Mma Ramotswe. "Look at Ranta."
"I do not like him," said Mma Makutsi. "I do not like the look of him at all."
"Precisely," said Mma Ramotswe. "That man is evil."
Mma Makutsi said nothing, and for a few minutes the two of them sat in total silence, Mma Makutsi staring at the photograph and Mma Ramotswe looking down into her mug of tea. Then Mma Ramotswe spoke.
"I think that if anything bad was done in that place, then it was done by that man. Do you think I am right?"
"Yes," said Mma Makutsi. "You are right." She paused.
"Are you going to find him now?"
"That is my next task," said Mma Ramotswe. "I shall ask around and see if anybody knows this man. But in the meantime, we have some letters to write, Mma. We have other cases to think about. That man at the brewery who was anxious about his brother. I have found out something now and we can write to him. But first we must write a letter about that accountant."
Mma Makutsi inserted a piece of paper into her typewriter and waited for Mma Ramotswe to dictate. The letter was not an interesting one-it was all about the tracing of a company accountant who had sold most of the company's assets and then disappeared. The police had stopped looking for him but the company wanted to trace its property.
Mma Makutsi typed automatically. Her mind was not on the task, but her training enabled her to type accurately even if she was thinking about something else. Now she was thinking of Oswald Ranta, and of how they might trace him. The spelling of Ranta was slightly unusual, and the simplest thing would be to look the name up in the telephone directory. Oswald Ranta was a smart-looking man who could be expected to have a telephone. All she had to do was to look him up and write down the address. Then she could go and make her own enquiries, if she wished, and present Mma Ramotswe with the information.
The letter finished, she passed it over to Mma Ramotswe for signature and busied herself with addressing the envelope. Then, while Mma Ramotswe made a note in the file, she slipped open her drawer and took out the Botswana telephone directory. As she had thought, there was only one Oswald Ranta.
"I must make a quick telephone call," she said. "I shall only be a moment."
Mma Ramotswe grunted her assent. She knew that Mma Makutsi could be trusted with the telephone, unlike most secretaries, who she knew used their employers' telephones to make all sorts of long-distance calls to boyfriends in remote places like Maun or Orapa.
Mma Makutsi spoke in a low voice, and Mma Ramotswe did not hear her.
"Is Rra Ranta there, please?"
"He is at work, Mma. I am the maid."
"I'm sorry to bother you, Mma. I must phone him at work. Can you tell me where that is?"
"He is at the University. He goes there every day."
"I see. Which number there?"
She noted it down on a piece of paper, thanked the maid, and replaced the receiver. Then she dialled, and again her pencil scratched across paper.
"Mma Ramotswe," she said quietly. "I have all the information you need."
Mma Ramotswe looked up sharply, "Information about what?"
"Oswald Ranta. He is living here in Gaborone. He is a lecturer in the Department of Rural Economics in the University. The secretary there says that he always comes in at eight o'clock every morning and that anybody who wishes to see him can make an appointment. You need not look any further."
Mma Ramotswe smiled.
"You are a very clever person," she said. "How did you find all this out?"
"I looked in the telephone directory," answered Mma Makutsi. "Then I telephoned to find out about the rest."
"I see," said Mma Ramotswe, still smiling. "That was very good detective work."
Mma Makutsi beamed at the praise. Detective work. She had done the job of a detective, although she was only a secretary.
"I am happy that you are pleased with my work," she said, after a moment. "I have wanted to be a detective. I'm happy being a secretary, but it is not the same thing as being a detective."
Mma Ramotswe frowned. "This is what you have wanted?"
"Every day," said Mma Makutsi. "Every day I have wanted this thing."
Mma Ramotswe thought about her secretary. She was a good worker, and intelligent, and if it meant so much to her, then why should she not be promoted? She could help her with her investigations, which would be a much better use of her time than sitting at her desk waiting for the telephone to ring. They could buy an answering machine to deal with calls if she was out of the office on an investigation. Why not give her the chance and make her happy?
"You shall have the thing you have wanted," said Mma Ramotswe. "You will be promoted to assistant detective. As from tomorrow."
Mma Makutsi rose to her feet. She opened her mouth to speak, but the emotion within her strangled any words. She sat down.
"I am glad that you are pleased," said Mma Ramotswe. "You have broken the glass ceiling that stops secretaries from reaching their full potential."
Mma Makutsi looked up, as if to search for the ceiling that she had broken. There were only the familiar ceiling boards, fly-tracked and buckling from the heat. But the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel itself could not at that moment have been more glorious in her eyes, more filled with hope and joy.

CHAPTER TWELVE
AT NIGHT IN GABORONE

ALONE IN her house in Zebra Drive, Mma Ramotswe awoke, as she often did, in the small hours of the morning, that time when the town was utterly silent; the time of maximum danger for rats, and other small creatures, as cobras and mam-bas moved silently in their hunting. She had always suffered from broken sleep, but had stopped worrying about it. She never lay awake for more than an hour or so, and, since she retired to bed early, she always managed at least seven hours of sleep a night. She had read that people needed eight hours, and that the body eventually claimed its due. If that were so, then she made up for it, as she often slept for several hours on a Saturday and never got up early on Sunday. So an hour or so lost at two or three each morning was nothing significant.
Recently, while waiting to have her hair braided at the Make Me Beautiful Salon she had noticed a magazine article on sleep. There was a famous doctor, she read, who knew all about sleep and had several words of advice for those whose sleep was troubled. This Dr Shapiro had a special clinic just for people who could not sleep and he attached wires to their heads to see what was wrong. Mma Ramotswe was intrigued: there was a picture of Dr Shapiro and a sleepy-looking man and woman, in dishevelled pyjamas, with a tangle of wires coming from their heads. She felt immediately sorry for them: the woman, in particular, looked miserable, like somebody who was being forced to participate in an immensely tedious procedure but who simply could not escape. Or was she miserable because of the hospital pyjamas, in which she was being photographed; she may always have wished to have her photograph in a magazine, and now her wish was to be fulfilled-in hospital pyjamas.
And then she read on, and became outraged. "Fat people often have difficulty in sleeping well," the article went on. "They suffer from a condition called sleep apnoea, which means that their breathing is interrupted in sleep. Such people are advised to lose weight."
Advised to lose weight! What has weight to do with it? There were many fat people who seemed to sleep perfectly well; indeed, there was a fat person who often sat under a tree outside Mma Ramotswe's house and who seemed to be asleep most of the time. Would one advise that person to lose weight? It seemed to Mma Ramotswe as if such advice would be totally unnecessary and would probably simply lead to unhap-piness. From being a fat person who was comfortably placed in the shade of a tree, this poor person would become a thin person, with not much of a bottom to sit upon, and probably unable to sleep as a result.
And what about her own case? She was a fat lady-traditionally built-and yet she had no difficulty in getting the required amount of sleep. It was all part of this terrible attack on people by those who had nothing better to do than to give advice on all sorts of subjects. These people, who wrote in newspapers and talked on the radio, were full of good ideas as to how to make people better. They poked their noses into other people's affairs, telling them to do this and do that. They looked at what you were eating and told you it was bad for you; then they looked at the way you raised your children and said that was bad too. And to make matters worse, they often said that if you did not heed their warnings, you would die. In this way they made everybody so frightened of them that they felt they had to accept the advice.
There were two main targets, Mma Ramotswe thought. First, there were fat people, who were now getting quite used to a relentless campaign against them; and then there were men. Mma Ramotswe knew that men were far from perfect- that many men were very wicked and selfish and lazy, and that they had, by and large, made rather a bad job of running Africa. Rut that was no reason to treat them badly, as some of these people did. There were plenty of good men about-people like Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, Sir Sereste Khama (First President of Botswana, Statesman, Paramount Chief of the Bangwato), and the late Obed Ramotswe, retired miner, expert judge of cattle, and her much-loved Daddy.
She missed the Daddy, and not a day went by, not one, that she did not think of him. Often when she awoke at this hour of the night, and lay alone in the darkness, she would search her memory to retrieve some recollection of him that had eluded her: some scrap of conversation, some gesture, some shared experience. Each memory was a precious treasure to her, fondly dwelt upon, sacramental in its significance. Obed Ramotswe, who had loved his daughter, and who had saved every rand, every cent, that he made in those cruel mines, and had built up that fine herd of cattle for her sake, had asked for nothing for himself. He did not drink, he did not smoke; he thought only of her and of what would happen to her.
If only she could erase those two awful years spent with Note Mokoti, when she knew that her Daddy had suffered so much, knowing, as he did, that Note would only make her unhappy. When she had returned to him, after Note's departure, and he had seen, even as he had embraced her, the scar of the latest beating, he had said nothing, and had stopped her explanation in its tracks.
"You do not have to tell me about it," he said. "We do not have to talk about it. It is over."
She had wanted to say sorry to him-to say that she should have asked his opinion of Note before she had married him, and listened, but she felt too raw for this and he would not have wanted it.
And she remembered his illness, when his chest had become more and more congested with the disease which killed so many miners, and how she had held his hand at his bedside and how, afterwards, she had gone outside, dazed, wanting to wail, as would be proper, but silent in her grief; and how she had seen a Go-Away bird staring at her from the bough of a tree, and how it had fluttered up, on to a higher branch, and turned round to stare at her again, before flying off; and of a red car that at that moment had passed in the road, with two children in the back, dressed in white dresses, with ribbons in their hair, who had looked at her too, and had waved. And of how the sky looked-heavy with rain, purple clouds stacked high atop one another, and of lightning in the distance, over the Kalahari, linking sky to earth. And of a woman who, not knowing that the world had just ended for her, called out to her from the verandah of the hospital: Come inside, Mma. Do not stand there! There is going to be a storm. Come inside quickly!

NOT FAR away, a small plane on its way to Gaborone flew low over the dam and then, losing height, floated down over the area known as the Village, over the cluster of shops on the Tlokweng Road, and finally, in the last minute of its journey, over the houses that dotted the bush on the airstrip boundary. In one of these, at a window, a girl sat watching. She had been up for an hour or so, as her sleep had been disturbed, and she had decided to get up from her bed and look out of the window. The wheelchair was beside the bed and she was able to manoeuvre herself into it without help. Then, propelling herself over to the open window, she had sat and looked out into the night.
She had heard the plane before she saw its lights. She had wondered what a plane was doing coming in at three in the morning. How could pilots fly at night? How could they tell where they were going in that limitless darkness? What if they took a wrong turn and went out over the Kalahari, where there were no lights to guide them and where it would be like flying within a dark cave?
She watched the plane fly almost directly above the house, and saw the shape of the wings and the cone of brightness which the landing light of the plane projected before it. The noise of the engine was loud now-not just a distant buzz-but a heavy, churning sound. Surely it would wake the household, she thought, but when the plane had dropped down on to the airstrip and the engine faded, the house was still in silence.
The girl looked out. There was a light off in the distance somewhere, maybe at the airstrip itself, but apart from that there was only darkness. The house looked away from the town, not towards it, and beyond the edge of the garden there was only scrub bush, trees and clumps of grass, and thorn bushes, and the odd red mud outcrop of a termite mound.
She felt alone. There were two other sleepers in that house: her younger brother, who never woke up at night, and the kind man who had fixed her wheelchair and who had then taken them in. She was not frightened to be here; she trusted that man to look after them-he was like Mr Jameson, who was the director of the charity that ran the orphan farm. He was a good man, who thought only about the orphans and their needs. At first, she had been unable to understand how there should be people like that. Why did people care for others, who were not even their family? She looked after her brother, but that was her duty.
The housemother had tried to explain it to her one day.
"We must look after other people," she had said. "Other people are our brothers and sisters. If they are unhappy, then we are unhappy. If they are hungry, then we are hungry. You see."
The girl had accepted this. It would be her duty, too, to look after other people. Even if she could never have a child herself, she would look after other children. And she could try to look after this kind man, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and make sure that everything in his house was clean and tidy. That would be her job.
There were some people who had mothers to look after them. She was not one of those people, she knew. But why had her mother died? She remembered her only vaguely now. She remembered her death, and the wailing from the other women. She remembered the baby being taken from her arms and put in the ground. She had dug him out, she believed, but was not sure. Perhaps somebody else had done that and had passed the boy on to her. And then she remembered going away and finding herself in a strange place.
Perhaps one day she would find a place where she would stay. That would be good. To know that the place you were in was your own place-where you should be.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A PROBLEM IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY

THERE WERE some clients who engaged Mma Ramotswe's sympathies on the first telling of their tale. Others one could not sympathise with because they were motivated by selfishness, or greed, or sometimes self-evident paranoia. But the genuine cases-the cases which made the trade of private detective into a real calling-could break the heart. Mma Ramotswe knew that Mr Letsenyane Badule was one of these.
He came without an appointment, arriving the day after Mma Ramotswe had returned from her trip to Molepolole. It was the first day of Mma Makutsi's promotion to assistant detective, and Mma Ramotswe had just explained to her that although she was now a private detective she still had secretarial duties.
She had realised that she would have to broach the subject early, to avoid misunderstandings.
"I can't employ both a secretary and an assistant," she said.
"This is a small agency. I do not make a big profit. You know that. You send out the bills."
Mma Makutsi's face had fallen. She was dressed in her smartest dress, and she had done something to her hair, which was standing on end in little pointed bunches. It had not worked.
"Am I still a secretary, then?" she said. "Do I still just do the typing?"
Mma Ramotswe shook her head. "I have not changed my mind," she said. "You are an assistant private detective. But somebody has to do the typing, don't they? That is a job for an assistant private detective. That, and other things."
Mma Makutsi's face brightened. "That is all right. I can do all the things I used to do, but I will do more as well. I shall have clients."
Mma Ramotswe drew in her breath. She had not envisaged giving Mma Makutsi her own clients. Her idea had been to assign her tasks to be performed under supervision. The actual management of cases was to be her own responsibility. But then she remembered. She remembered how, as girl she had worked in the Small Upright General Dealer Store in Mochudi and how thrilled she had been when she had first been allowed to do a stock-taking on her own. It was selfishness to keep the clients to herself. How could anybody be started on a career if those who were at the top kept all the interesting work for themselves?
"Yes," she said quietly. "You can have your own clients. But I will decide which ones you get. You may not get the very big clients ... to begin with. You can start with small matters and work up."
"That is quite fair," said Mma Makutsi. "Thank you, Mma. I
do not want to run before I can walk. They told us that at the Botswana Secretarial College. Learn the easy things first and then learn the difficult things. Not the other way round."
"That's a good philosophy," said Mma Ramotswe. "Many young people these days have not been taught that. They want the big jobs right away. They want to start at the top, with lots of money and a big Mercedes-Benz."
"That is not wise," said Mma Makutsi. "Do the little things when you are young and then work up to doing the big things later."
"Mmm," mused Mma Ramotswe. "These Mercedes-Benz cars have not been a good thing for Africa. They are very fine cars, I believe, but all the ambitious people in Africa want one before they have earned it. That has made for big problems."
"The more Mercedes-Benzes there are in a country," offered Mma Makutsi, "the worse that country is. If there is a country without any Mercedes-Benzes, then that will be a good place. You can count on that."
Mma Ramotswe stared at her assistant. It was an interesting theory, which could be discussed at greater length later on. For the meantime, there were one or two matters which still needed to be resolved.
"You will still make the tea," she said firmly. "You have always done that very well."
"I am very happy to do that," said Mma Makutsi, smiling. "There is no reason why an assistant private detective cannot make tea when there is nobody more junior to do it."
IT HAD been an awkward discussion and Mma Ramotswe was pleased that it was over. She thought that it would be best if
she gave her new assistant a case as soon as possible, to avoid the buildup of tension, and when, later that morning, Mr Let-senyane Badule arrived she decided that this would be a case for Mma Makutsi.
He drove up in a Mercedes-Benz, but it was an old one, and therefore morally insignificant, with signs of rust around the rear sills and with a deep dent on the driver's door.
"I am not one who usually comes to private detectives," he said, sitting nervously on the edge of the comfortable chair reserved for clients. Opposite him, the two women smiled reassuringly. The fat woman-she was the boss, he knew, as he had seen her photograph in the newspaper-and that other one with the odd hair and the fancy dress, her assistant perhaps.
"You need not feel embarrassed," said Mma Ramotswe. "We have all sorts of people coming through this door. There is no shame in asking for help."
"In fact," interjected Mma Makutsi. "It is the strong ones who ask for help. It is the weak ones who are too ashamed to
come.
Mma Ramotswe nodded. The client seemed to be reassured by what Mma Makutsi had said. This was a good sign. Not everyone knows how to set a client at ease, and it boded well that Mma Makutsi had shown herself able to choose her words well.
The tightness of Mr Badule's grip on the brim of his hat loosened, and he sat back in his chair.
"I have been very worried," he said. "Every night I have been waking up in the quiet hours and have been unable to get back to sleep. I lie in my bed and I turn this way and that and cannot get this one thought out of my head. All the time it is there,
going round and round. Just one question, which I ask myself time after time after time."
"And you never find an answer?" said Mma Makutsi. "The night is a very bad time for questions to which there are no answers."
Mr Badule looked at her. 'You are very right, my sister. There is nothing worse than a nighttime question."
He stopped, and for a moment or two nobody spoke. Then Mma Ramotswe broke the silence.
"Why don't you tell us about yourself, Rra? Then a little bit later on, we can get to this question that is troubling you so badly. My assistant will make us a cup of tea first, and then we can drink it together."
Mr Badule nodded eagerly. He seemed close to tears for some reason, and Mma Ramotswe knew that the ritual of tea, with the mugs hot against the hand, would somehow make the story flow and would ease the mind of this troubled man.
I AM not a big, important man, began Mr Badule. I come from Lobatse originally. My father was an orderly at the High Court there and he served many years. He worked for the British, and they gave him two medals, with the picture of the Queen's head on them. He wore these every day, even after he retired. When he left the service, one of the judges gave him a hoe to use on his lands. The judge had ordered the hoe to be made in the prison workshop and the prisoners, on the judge's instructions, had burned an inscription into the wooden handle with a hot nail. It said: First Class Orderly Badule, served Her Majesty and then the Republic of Botswana loyally for fifty years.
Well done tried and trusty servant, from Mr Justice Maclean, Puisne Judge, High Court of Botswana.
That judge was a good man, and he was kind to me too. He spoke to one of the fathers at the Catholic School and they gave me a place in standard four. I worked hard at this school, and when I reported one of the other boys for stealing meat from the kitchen, they made me deputy-head boy.
I passed my Cambridge School certificate and afterwards I got a good job with the Meat Commission. I worked hard there too and again I reported other employees for stealing meat. I did not do this because I wanted promotion, but because I am not one who likes to see dishonesty in any form. That is one thing I learned from my father. As an orderly in the High Court, he saw all sorts of bad people, including murderers. He saw them standing in the court and telling lies because they knew that their wicked deeds had caught up with them. He watched them when the judges sentenced them to death and saw how big strong men who had beaten and stabbed other people became like little boys, terrified and sobbing and saying that they were sorry for all their bad deeds, which they had said they hadn't done anyway.
With such a background, it is not surprising that my father should have taught his sons to be honest and to tell the truth always. So I did not hesitate to bring these dishonest employees to justice and my employers were very pleased.
"You have stopped these wicked people from stealing the meat of Botswana," they said. "Our eyes cannot see what our employees are doing. Your eyes have helped us."
I did not expect a reward, but I was promoted. And in my new job, which was in the headquarters office, I found more
meat, This time in a more indirect and clever way, but it was still stealing meat. So I wrote a letter to the General Manager and said: "Here is how you are losing meat, right under your noses, in the general office." And at the end I put the names, all in alphabetical order, and signed the letter and sent it off.
They were very pleased, and, as a result, they promoted me even further. By now, anybody who was dishonest had been frightened into leaving the company, and so there was no more work of that sort for me to do. But I still did well, and eventually I had saved enough money to buy my own butchery. I received a large cheque from the company, which was sorry to see me go, and I set up my butchery just outside Gaborone. You may have seen it on the road to Lobatse. It is called Honest Deal Butchery.
My butchery does quite well, but I do not have a lot of money to spare. The reason for this is my wife. She is a fashionable lady, who likes smart clothes and who does not like to work too much herself. I do not mind her not working, but it upsets me to see her spend so much money on braiding her hair and having new dresses made by the Indian tailor. I am not a smart man, but she is a very smart lady.
For many years after we got married there were no children. But then she became pregnant and we had a son. I was very proud, and my only sadness was that my father was not still alive so that he could see his fine new grandson.
My son is not very clever. We sent him to the primary school near our house and we kept getting reports saying that he had to try harder and that his handwriting was very untidy and full of mistakes. My wife said that he would have to be sent to a
private school, where they would have better teachers and where they would force him to write more neatly, but I was worried that we could not afford that.
When I said that, she became very cross. "If you cannot pay for it," she said, "then I will go to a charity I know and get them to pay the fees."
"There are no such charities," I said. "If there were, then they would be inundated. Everyone wants his child to go to a private school. They would have every parent in Botswana lining up for help. It is impossible."
"Oh it is, is it?" she said. "I shall speak to this charity tomorrow, and you will see. You just wait and see."
She went off to town the next day and when she came back she said it had all been arranged. "The charity will pay all his school fees to go to Thornhill. He can start next term."
I was astonished. Thornhill, as you know, Bomma, is a very good school and the thought of my son going there was very exciting. But I could not imagine how my wife had managed to persuade a charity to pay for it, and when I asked her for the details so that I could write to them and thank them she replied that it was a secret charity.
"There are some charities which do not want to shout out their good deeds from the rooftops," she said. "They have asked me to tell nobody about this. But if you wish to thank them, you can write a letter, which I will deliver to them on your behalf."
I wrote this letter, but got no reply.
"They are far too busy to be writing to every parent they help," said my wife. "I don't see what you're complaining about. They're paying the fees, aren't they? Stop bothering them with all these letters."
There had only been one letter, but my wife always exaggerates things, at least when it concerns me. She accuses me of eating "hundreds of pumpkins, all the time," when I eat fewer pumpkins than she does. She says that I make more noise than an aeroplane when I snore, which is not true. She says that I am always spending money on my lazy nephew and sending him thousands of pula every year. In fact, I only give him one hundred pula on his birthday and one hundred pula for his Christmas box. Where she gets this figure of thousands of pula, I don't know. I also don't know where she gets all the money for her fashionable life. She tells me that she saves it, by being careful in the house, but I cannot see how it adds up. I will talk to you a little bit later about that.
But you must not misunderstand me, ladies. I am not one of these husbands who does not like his wife. I am very happy with my wife. Every day I reflect on how happy I am to be married to a fashionable lady-a lady who makes people look at her in the street. Many butchers are married to women who do not look very glamorous, but I am not one of those butchers. I am the butcher with the very glamorous wife, and that makes me proud.
I AM also proud of my son. When he went to Thornhill he was behind in all his subjects and I was worried that they would put him down a year. But when I spoke to the teacher, she said that I should not worry about this, as the boy was very bright and would soon catch up. She said that bright children could always manage to get over earlier difficulties if they made up their mind to work.
My son liked the school. He was soon scoring top marks in
mathematics and his handwriting improved so much that you would think it was a different boy writing. He wrote an essay which I have kept, "The Causes of Soil Erosion in Botswana," and one day I shall show that to you, if you wish. It is a very beautiful piece of work and I think that if he carries on like this, he will one day become Minister of Mines or maybe Minister of Water Resources. And to think that he will get there as the grandson of a High Court orderly and the son of an ordinary butcher.
You must be thinking: What has this man got to complain about? He has a fashionable wife and a clever son. He has got a butchery of his own. Why complain? And I understand why one might think that, but that does not make me any more unhappy. Every night I wake up and think the same thought. Every day when I come back from work and find that my wife is not yet home, and I wait until ten or eleven o'clock before she returns, the anxiety gnaws away at my stomach like a hungry animal. Because, you see, Bomma, the truth of the matter is that I think my wife is seeing another man. I know that there are many husbands who say that, and they are imagining things, and I hope that I am just the same-just imagining- but I cannot have any peace until I know whether what I fear is true.
WHEN MR Letsenyane Badule eventually left, driving off in his rather battered Mercedes-Benz, Mma Ramotswe looked at Mma Makutsi and smiled.
"Very simple," she said. "I think this is a very simple case, Mma Makutsi. You should be able to handle this case yourself with no trouble."
Mma Makutsi went back to her own desk, smoothing out the fabric of her smart blue dress. "Thank you, Mma. I shall do my best."
Mma Ramotswe nodded. "Yes," she went on. "A simple case of a man with a bored wife. It is a very old story. I read in a magazine that it is the sort of story that French people like to read. There is a story about a French lady called Mma Bovary, who was just like this, a very famous story. She was a lady who lived in the country and who did not like to be married to the same, dull man."
"It is better to be married to a dull man," said Mma Makutsi. "This Mma Bovary was very foolish. Dull men are very good husbands. They are always loyal and they never run away with other women. You are very lucky to be engaged to a . . ."
She stopped. She had not intended it, and yet it was too late now. She did not consider Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to be dull; he was reliable, and he was a mechanic, and he would be an utterly satisfactory husband. That is what she had meant; she did not mean to suggest that he was actually dull.
Mma Ramotswe stared at her. "To a what?" she said. "I am very lucky to be engaged to a what?"
Mma Makutsi looked down at her shoes. She felt hot and confused. The shoes, her best pair, the pair with the three glittering buttons stitched across the top, stared back at her, as shoes always do.
Then Mma Ramotswe laughed. "Don't worry," she said. "I know what you mean, Mma Makutsi. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni is maybe not the most fashionable man in town, but he is one of the best men there is. You could trust him with anything. He would never let you down. And I know he would never have any secrets from me. That is very important."
Grateful for her employer's understanding, Mma Makutsi was quick to agree.
'That is by far the best sort of man," she said. "If I am ever lucky enough to find a man like that, I hope he asks me to marry him."
She glanced down at her shoes again, and they met her stare. Shoes are realists, she thought, and they seemed to be saying: No chance. Sorry, but no chance.
"Well," said Mma Ramotswe. "Let's leave the subject of men in general and get back to Mr Badule. What do you think? Mr Andersen's book says that you must have a working supposition. You must set out to prove or disprove something. We have agreed that Mma Badule sounds bored, but do you think that there is more to it than that?"
Mma Makutsi frowned. "I think that there is something going on. She is getting money from somewhere, which means she is getting it from a man. She is paying the school fees herself with the money she has saved up."
Mma Ramotswe agreed. "So all you have to do is to follow her one day and see where she goes. She should lead you straight to this other man. Then you see how long she stays there, and you speak to the housemaid. Give her one hundred pula, and she will tell you the full story. Maids like to speak about the things that go on in their employers' houses. The employers often think that maids cannot hear, or see, even. They ignore them. And then, one day, they realise that the maid has been hearing and seeing all their secrets and is bursting to talk to the first person who asks her. That maid will tell you everything. You just see. Then you tell Mr Badule."
"That is the bit that I will not like," said Mma Makutsi. "All
the rest I don't mind, but telling this poor man about this bad wife of his will not be easy."
Mma Ramotswe was reassuring. "Don't worry. Almost every time we detectives have to tell something like that to a client, the client already knows. We just provide the proof they are looking for. They know everything. We never tell them anything new."
"Even so," said Mma Makutsi. "Poor man. Poor man."
"Maybe," Mma Ramotswe added. "But remember, that for every cheating wife in Botswana, there are five hundred and fifty cheating husbands."
Mma Makutsi whistled. "That is an amazing figure," she said. "Where did you read that?"
"Nowhere," chuckled Mma Ramotswe. "I made it up. But that doesn't stop it from being true."
IT WAS a wonderful moment for Mma Makutsi when she set forth on her first case. She did not have a driving licence, and so she had to ask her uncle, who used to drive a Government truck and who was now retired, to drive her on the assignment in the old Austin which he hired out, together with his services as driver, for weddings and funerals. The uncle was thrilled to be included on such a mission, and donned a pair of darkened glasses for the occasion.
They drove out early to the house beside the butchery, where Mr Badule and his wife lived. It was a slightly down-at-heel bungalow, surrounded by pawpaw trees, and with a silver-painted tin roof that needed attention. The yard was virtually empty, apart from the pawpaws and a wilting row of cannas along the front of the house. At the rear of the house, backed
up against a wire fence that marked the end of the property, were the servant quarters and a lean-to garage.
It was hard to find a suitable place to wait, but eventually Mma Makutsi concluded that if they parked just round the corner, they would be half-concealed by the small take-out stall that sold roast mealies, strips of fly-blown dried meat and, for those who wanted a real treat, delicious pokes of mopani worms. There was no reason why a car should not park there; it would be a good place for lovers to meet, or for somebody to wait for the arrival of a rural relative off one of the rickety buses that careered in from the Francistown Road. The uncle was excited, and lit a cigarette. "I have seen many films like this," he said. "I never dreamed that I would be doing this work, right here in Gaborone."
"Being a private detective is not all glamorous work," said his niece. "We have to be patient. Much of our work is just sitting and waiting."
"I know," said the uncle. "I have seen that on films too. I have seen these detective people sit in their cars and eat sandwiches while they wait. Then somebody starts shooting."
Mma Makutsi raised an eyebrow. "There is no shooting in Botswana," she said. "We are a civilized country."
They lapsed into a companionable silence, watching people set about their morning business. At seven o'clock the door of the Badule house opened and a boy came out, dressed in the characteristic uniform of Thornhill School. He stood for a moment in front of the house, adjusting the strap of his school satchel, and then walked up the path that led to the front gate. Then he turned smartly to the left and strode down the road. "That is the son," said Mma Makutsi, lowering her voice, although nobody could possibly hear them. "He has a scholar-
ship to Thornhill School. He is a bright boy, with very good handwriting."
The uncle looked interested.
"Should I write this down?" he asked. "I could keep a record of what happens."
Mma Makutsi was about to explain that this would not be necessary, but she changed her mind. It would give him something to do, and there was no harm in it. So the uncle wrote on a scrap of paper that he had extracted from his pocket: "Badule boy leaves house at 7 A.M. and proceeds to school on foot." He showed her his note, and she nodded. "You would make a very good detective, Uncle," she said, adding: "It is a pity you are too old."
Twenty minutes later, Mr Badule emerged from the house and walked over to the butchery. He unlocked the door and admitted his two assistants, who had been waiting for him under a tree. A few minutes later, one of the assistants, now wearing a heavily bloodstained apron, came out carrying a large stainless steel tray, which he washed under a standpipe at the side of the building. Then two customers arrived, one having walked up the street, another getting off a minibus which stopped just beyond the take-out stall.
"Customers enter shop," wrote the uncle. "Then leave, carrying parcels. Probably meat."
Again he showed the note to his niece, who nodded approvingly.
"Very good. Very useful. But it is the lady we are interested in," she said. "Soon it will be time for her to do something."
They waited a further four hours. Then, shortly before twelve, when the car had become stiflingly hot under the sun, and just at the point when Mma Makutsi was becoming irri-
tated by her uncle's constant note-taking, they saw Mma Badule emerge from behind the house and walk over to the garage. There she got into the battered Mercedes-Benz and reversed out of the front drive. This was the signal for the uncle to start his car and, at a respectful distance, follow the Mercedes as it made its way into town.
Mma Badule drove fast, and it was difficult for the uncle to keep up with her in his old Austin, but they still had her in sight by the time that she drew into the driveway of a large house on Nyerere Drive. They drove past slowly, and caught a glimpse of her getting out of the car and striding towards the shady verandah. Then the luxuriant garden growth, so much richer than the miserable pawpaw trees at the butchery house, obscured their view.
But it was enough. They drove slowly round the corner and parked under a jacaranda tree at the side of the road.
"What now?" asked the uncle. "Do we wait here until she leaves?"
Mma Makutsi was uncertain. "There is not much point in sitting here," she said. "We are really interested in what is going on in that house."
She remembered Mma Ramotswe's advice. The best source of information was undoubtedly the maids, if they could be persuaded to talk. It was now lunchtime, and the maids would be busy in the kitchen. But in an hour or so, they would have their own lunch break, and would come back to the servants' quarters. And those could be reached quite easily, along the narrow sanitary lane that ran along the back of the properties. That would be the time to speak to them and to offer the crisp new fifty pula notes which Mma Ramotswe had issued her the previous evening.
The uncle wanted to accompany her, and Mma Makutsi had difficulty persuading him that she could go alone.
"It could be dangerous," he said. "You might need protection."
She brushed aside his objections. "Dangerous, Uncle? Since when has it been dangerous to talk to a couple of maids in the middle of Gaborone, in the middle of the day?"
He had had no answer to that, but he nonetheless looked anxious when she left him in the car and made her way along the lane to the back gate. He watched her hesitate behind the small, whitewashed building which formed the servants' quarters, before making her way round to the door, and then he lost sight of her. He took out his pencil, glanced at the time, and made a note: Mma Makutsi enters servants' quarters at 2:10 P.M.
THERE WERE two of them, just as she had anticipated. One of them was older than the other, and had crow's-feet wrinkles at the side of her eyes. She was a comfortable, large-chested woman, dressed in a green maid's dress and a pair of scuffed white shoes of the sort which nurses wear. The younger woman, who looked as if she was in her mid-twenties, Mma Makutsi's own age, was wearing a red housecoat and had a sultry, spoiled face. In other clothes, and made-up, she would not have looked out of place as a bar girl. Perhaps she is one, thought Mma Makutsi.
The two women stared at her, the younger one quite rudely.
"Ko ko," said Mma Makutsi, politely, using the greeting that could substitute for a knock when there was no door to be knocked upon. This was necessary, as although the women were not inside their house they were not quite outside either,
being seated on two stools in the cramped open porch at the front of the building.
The older woman studied their visitor, raising her hand to shade her eyes against the harsh light of the early afternoon. "Dumela, Mma. Are you well?"
The formal greetings were exchanged, and then there was silence. The younger woman poked at their small, blackened kettle with a stick.
"I wanted to talk to you, my sisters," said Mma Makutsi. "I want to find out about that woman who has come to visit this house, the one who drives that Mercedes-Benz. You know that one?"
The younger maid dropped the stick. The older one nodded. "Yes, we know that woman." "Who is she?"
The younger retrieved her stick and looked up at Mma Makutsi. "She is a very important lady, that one! She comes to the house and sits in the chairs and drinks tea. That is who she is."
The other one chuckled. "But she is also a very tired lady," she said. "Poor lady, she works so hard that she has to go and lie down in the bedroom a lot, to regain her strength."
The younger one burst into a peal of laughter. "Oh yes," she said. "There is much resting done in that bedroom. He helps her to rest her poor legs. Poor lady."
Mma Makutsi joined in their laughter. She knew immediately that this was going to be much easier than she had imagined it would be. Mma Ramotswe was right, as usual; people liked to talk, and, in particular, they liked to talk about people who annoyed them in some way. All one had to do was to discover the grudge and the grudge itself would do all the work.
She felt in her pocket for the two fifty pula notes; it might not even be necessary to use them after all. If this were the case, she might ask Mma Ramotswe to authorise their payment to her uncle.
"Who is the man who lives in this house?" she said. "Has he no wife of his own?"
This was the signal for them both to giggle. "He has a wife all right," said the older one. "She lives out at their village, up near Mahalaype. He goes there at weekends. This lady here is his town wife."
"And does the country wife know about this town wife?"
"No," said the older woman. "She would not like it. She is a Catholic woman, and she is very rich. Her father had four shops up there and bought a big farm. Then they came and dug a big mine on that farm and so they had to pay that woman a lot of money. That is how she bought this big house for her husband. But she does not like Gaborone."
"She is one of those people who never likes to leave the village," the younger maid interjected. "There are some people like that. She lets her husband live here to run some sort of business that she owns down here. But he has to go back every Friday, like a schoolboy going home for the weekend."
Mma Makutsi looked at the kettle. It was a very hot day, and she wondered if they would offer her tea. Fortunately the older maid noticed her glance and made the offer.
"And I'll tell you another thing," said the younger maid as she lit the paraffin stove underneath the kettle. "I would write a letter to the wife and tell her about that other woman, if I were not afraid that I would lose my job."
"He told us," said the other. "He said that if we told his wife, then we would lose our jobs immediately. He pays us well, this
man. He pays more than any other employer on this whole street. So we cannot lose this job. We just keep our mouths shut..."
She stopped, and at that moment both maids looked at one another in dismay.
"Aiee!" wailed the younger one. "What have we been doing? Why have we spoken like this to you? Are you from Mahalaype? Have you been sent by the wife? We are finished! We are very stupid women. Aiee!"
"No," said Mma Makutsi quickly. "I do not know the wife. I have not even heard of her. I have been asked to find out by that other woman's husband what she is doing. That is all."
The two maids became calmer, but the old one still looked worried. "But if you tell him what is happening, then he will come and chase this man away from his own wife and he might tell the real wife that her husband has another woman. That way we are finished too. It makes no difference."
"No," said Mma Makutsi. "I don't have to tell him what is going on. I might just say that she is seeing some man but I don't know who it is. What difference does it make to him? All he needs to know is that she is seeing a man. It does not matter which man it is."
The younger maid whispered something to the other, who frowned.
"What was that, Mma?" asked Mma Makutsi. The older one looked up at her. "My sister was just wondering about the boy. You see, there is a boy, who belongs to that smart woman. We do not like that woman, but we do like the boy. And that boy, you see, is the son of this man, not of the other man. They both have very big noses. There is no doubt about it. You take a look at them and you will see it for yourself.
This one is the father of that boy, even if the boy lives with the other one. He comes here every afternoon after school. The mother has told the boy that he must never speak to his other father about coming here, and so the boy keeps this thing secret from him. That is bad. Boys should not be taught to lie like that. What will become of Botswana, Mma, if we teach boys to behave like that? Where will Botswana be if we have so many dishonest boys? God will punish us, I am sure of it. Aren't you?"
MMA MAKUTSI looked thoughtful when she returned to the Austin in its shady parking place. The uncle had dropped off to sleep, and was dribbling slightly at the side of his mouth. She touched him gently on the sleeve and he awoke with a start.
"Ah! You are safe! I am glad that you are back."
"We can go now," said Mma Makutsi. "I have found out everything I needed to know."They drove directly back to the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Mma Ramotswe was out, and so Mma Makutsi paid her uncle with one of the fifty pula notes and sat down at her desk to type her report.
"The client's fears are confirmed," she wrote. "His wife has been seeing the same man for many years. He is the husband of a rich woman, who is also a Catholic. The rich woman does not know about this. The boy is the son of this man, and not the son of the client. I am not sure what to do, but I think that we have the following choices:
(a) We tell the client everything that we have found out.
That is what he has asked us to do. If we do not tell him this, then perhaps we would he misleading him. By taking on this case, have we not promised to tell him everything? If that is so, then we must do so, because we must keep our promises. If we do not keep our promises, then there will be no difference between Botswana and a certain other country in Africa which I do not want to name here but which I know you know.
(b) We tell the client that there is another man, but we do not know who it is. This is strictly true, because I did not find out the name of the man, although I know which house he lives in. I do not like to lie, as I am a lady who believes in God. But God sometimes expects us to think about what the results will be of telling somebody something. If we tell the client that that boy is not his son, he will be very sad. It will be like losing a son. Will that make him happier? Would God want him to be unhappy? And if we tell the client this, and there is a big row, then the father may not be able to pay the school fees, as he is doing at present. The rich woman may stop him from doing that and then the boy will suffer. He will have to leave that school.
For these reasons, I do not know what to do." She signed the report and put it on Mma Ramotswe's desk. Then she stood up and looked out of the window, over the acacia trees and up into the broad, heat-drained sky. It was all very well being a product of the Botswana Secretarial College, and it was all very well having graduated with 97 percent. But they did not teach moral philosophy there, and she had no idea how to resolve the dilemma with which her successful investigation had presented her. She would leave that to Mma Ramotswe.
She was a wise woman, with far more experience of life than herself, and she would know what to do.
Mma Makutsi made herself a cup of bush tea and stretched out in her chair. She looked at her shoes, with their three twinkling buttons. Did they know the answer? Perhaps they did.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A TRIP  INTO TOWN

IN THE morning of Mma Makutsi's remarkably successful, but nonetheless puzzling investigation into the affairs of Mr Letsenyane Badule, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, and undoubtedly one of the finest mechanics in Botswana, decided to take his newly acquired foster children into town on a shopping expedition. Their arrival in his house had confused his ill-tempered maid, Mma Florence Peko, and had plunged him into a state of doubt and alarm that at times bordered on panic. It was not every day that one went to fix a diesel pump and came back with two children, one of them in a wheelchair, saddled with an implied moral obligation to look after the children for the rest of their childhood, and, indeed, in the case of the wheelchair-bound girl, for the rest of her life. How Mma Silvia Potokwane, the ebullient matron of the orphan farm, had managed to persuade him to take the children was beyond him. There had been some sort of conversation about it, he knew, and he had said that he would do it, but how had he been pushed into committing himself there and then? Mma Potokwane was like a clever lawyer engaged in the examination of a witness: agreement would be obtained to some innocuous statement and then, before the witness knew it, he would have agreed to a quite different proposal.
But the children had arrived, and it was now too late to do anything about it. As he sat in the office of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors and contemplated a mound of paperwork, he made two decisions. One was to employ a secretary-a decision which he knew, even as he took it, that he would never get round to implementing-and the second was to stop worrying about how the children had arrived and to concentrate on doing the right thing by them. After all, if one contemplated the situation in a calm and detached state of mind, it had many redeeming features. The children were fine children- you only had to hear the story of the girl's courage to realise that-and their life had taken a sudden and dramatic turn for the better. Yesterday they had been just two of one hundred and fifty children at the orphan farm. Today they were placed in their own house, with their own rooms, and with a father- yes, he was a father now!-who owned his own garage. There was no shortage of money; although not a conspicuously wealthy man, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was perfectly comfortable. Not a single thebe was owed on the garage; the house was subject to no bond; and the three accounts in Barclays Bank of Botswana were replete with pula. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni could look any member of the Gaborone Chamber of Commerce in the eye and say: "I have never owed you a penny. Not one."
How many businessmen could do that these days? Most of them existed on credit, kowtowing to that smug Mr Timon Mothokoli, who controlled business credit at the bank. He had heard that Mr Mothokoli could drive to work from his house on Kaunda Way and would be guaranteed to drive past the doors of at least five men who would quake at his passing. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni could, if he wished, ignore Mr Mothokoli if he met him in the Mall, not that he would ever do that, of course.
So if there is all this liquidity, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, then why not spend some of it on the children? He would arrange for them to go to school, of course, and there was no reason why they should not go to a private school, too. They would get good teachers there; teachers who knew all about Shakespeare and geometry. They would learn everything that they needed to get good jobs. Perhaps the boy . . . No, it was almost too much to hope for, but it was such a delicious thought. Perhaps the boy would demonstrate an aptitude for mechanical matters and could take over the running of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. For a few moments, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni indulged himself in the thought: his son, his son, standing in front of the garage, wiping his hands on a piece of oily rag, after having done a good job on a complicated gearbox. And, in the background, sitting in the office, himself and Mma Ramotswe, much older now, grey-haired, drinking bush tea.
That would be far in the future, and there was much to be done before that happy outcome could be achieved. First of all, he would take them into town and buy them new clothes. The orphan farm, as usual, had been generous in giving them going-away clothes that were nearly new, but it was not the same as having one's own clothes, bought from a shop. He imagined that these children had never had that luxury. They would never have unwrapped clothes from their factory packaging and put them on, with that special, quite unreproducible smell of new fabric rich in the nostrils. He would drive them in immediately, that very morning, and buy them all the clothes they needed. Then he would take them to the chemist shop and the girl could buy herself some creams and shampoo, and other things that girls might like for themselves. There was only carbolic soap at home, and she deserved better than that.

MR J.L.B. Matekoni fetched the old green truck from the garage, which had plenty of room in the back for the wheelchair. The children were sitting on the verandah when he arrived home; the boy had found a stick which he was tying up in string for some reason, and the girl was crocheting a cover for a milk jug. They taught them crochet at the orphan farm, and some of them had won prizes for their designs. She is a talented girl, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni; this girl will be able to do anything, once she is given the chance.
They greeted him politely, and nodded when he asked whether the maid had given them their breakfast. He had asked her to come in early so as to be able to attend to the children while he went off to the garage, and he was slightly surprised that she had complied. But there were sounds from the kitchen-the hangings and scrapings that she seemed to make whenever she was in a bad mood-and these confirmed her presence.
Watched by the maid, who sourly followed their progress until they were out of sight near the old Botswana Defence Force Club, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and the two children bumped their way into town in the old truck. The springs were gone, and could only be replaced with difficulty, as the manufacturers had passed into mechanical history, but the engine still worked and the bumpy ride was a thrill for the girl and boy. Rather to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's surprise, the girl showed an interest in its history, asking him how old it was and whether it used a lot of oil.
"I have heard that old engines need more oil," she said. "Is this true, Rra?"
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni explained about worn engine parts and their heavy demands, and she listened attentively. The boy, by contrast, did not appear to be interested. Still, there was time. He would take him to the garage and get the apprentices to show him how to take off wheel nuts. That was a task that a boy could perform, even when he was as young as this one. It was best to start early as a mechanic. It was an art which, ideally, one should learn at one's father's side. Did not the Lord himself learn to be a carpenter in his father's workshop? Mr J.L.B. Matekoni thought. If the Lord came back today, he would probably be a mechanic, he reflected. That would be a great honour for mechanics everywhere. And there is no doubt but that he would choose Africa: Israel was far too dangerous these days. In fact, the more one thought about it, the more likely it was that he would choose Botswana, and Gaborone in particular. Now that would be a wonderful honour for the people of Botswana; but it would not happen, and there was no point in thinking about it any further. The Lord was not going to come back; we had had our chance and we had not made very much of it, unfortunately.
He parked the car beside the British High Commission, noting that His Excellency's white Range Rover was in front of the door. Most of the diplomatic cars went to the big garages, with their advanced diagnostic equipment and their exotic bills, but His Excellency insisted on Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
"You see that car over there?" said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to the boy. "That is a very important vehicle. I know that car very well."
The boy looked down at the ground and said nothing.
"It is a beautiful white car," said the girl, from behind him. "It is like a cloud with wheels."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni turned round and looked at her.
"That is a very good way of talking about that car," he said. "I shall remember that."
"How many cylinders does a car like that have?" the girl went on. "Is it six?"
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni smiled, and turned back to the boy. "Well," he said. "How many cylinders do you think that car has in its engine?"
"One?" said the boy quietly, still looking firmly at the ground.
"One!" mocked his sister. "It is not a two-stroke!"
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's eyes opened wide. "A two-stroke? Where did you hear about two-strokes?"
The girl shrugged. "I have always known about two-strokes," she said. "They make a loud noise and you mix the oil in with the petrol. They are mostly on small motorbikes. Nobody likes a two-stroke engine."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni nodded. "No, a two-stroke engine is often very troublesome." He paused. "But we must not stand here and talk about engines. We must go to the shops and buy you clothes and other things that you need."

THE SHOP assistants were sympathetic to the girl, and went with her into the changing room to help her try the dresses which she had selected from the rack. She had modest tastes, and consistently chose the cheapest available, but these, she said, were the ones she wanted. The boy appeared more interested; he chose the brightest shirts he could find and set his heart on a pair of white shoes which his sister vetoed on the grounds of impracticality.
"We cannot let him have those, Rra," she said to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "They would get very dirty in no time and then he will just throw them to one side. This is a very vain boy."
"I see," mused Mr J.L.B. Matekoni thoughtfully. The boy was respectful, and presentable, but that earlier delightful image he had entertained of his son standing outside Tlok-weng Road Speedy Motors seemed to have faded. Another image had appeared, of the boy in a smart white shirt and a suit. . . But that could not be right.
They finished their shopping and were making their way back across the broad public square outside the post office when the photographer summoned them.
"I can do a photograph for you," he said. "Right here. You stand under this tree and I can take your photograph. Instant. Just like that. A handsome family group."
"Would you like that?" asked Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "A photograph to remind us of our shopping trip." The children beamed up at him.
"Yes, please," said the girl, adding, "I have never had a photograph."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni stood quite still. This girl, now in her early teens, had never had a photograph of herself. There was no record of her childhood, nothing which would remind her of what she used to be. There was nothing, no image, of which she could say: "That is me." And all this meant that there was nobody who had ever wanted her picture; she had simply not been special enough.
He caught his breath, and for a moment, he felt an overwhelming rush of pity for these two children; and pity mixed with love. He would give them these things. He would make it up to them. They would have everything that other children had been given, which other children took for granted; all that love, each year of lost love, would be replaced, bit by bit, until the scales were righted.
He wheeled the wheelchair into position in front of the tree where the photographer had established his outdoor studio. Then, his rickety tripod perched in the dust, the photographer crouched behind his camera and waved a hand to attract his subject's attention. There was a clicking sound, followed by a whirring, and with the air of a magician completing a trick, the photographer peeled off the protective paper and blew across the photograph to dry it.
The girl took it, and smiled. Then the photographer positioned the boy, who stood, hands clasped behind him, mouth wide open in a smile; again the theatrical performance with the print and the pleasure on the child's face.
"There," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "Now you can put those in your rooms. And one day we will have more photographs."
He turned round and prepared to take control of the wheelchair, but he stopped, and his arms fell to his sides, useless, paralysed.
There was Mma Ramotswe, standing before him, a basket laden with letters in her right hand. She had been making her way to the post office when she saw him and she had stopped. What was going on? What was Mr J.L.B. Matekoni doing, and who were these children?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE SULLEN, BAD MAID ACTS

FLORENCE PEKO, the sour and complaining maid of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, had suffered from headaches ever since Mma Ramotswe had first been announced as her employer's future wife. She was prone to stress headaches, and anything untoward could bring them on. Her brother's trial, for instance, had been a season of headaches, and every month, when she went to visit him in the prison near the Indian supermarket she would feel a headache even before she took her place in the shuffling queue of relatives waiting to visit. Her brother had been involved in stolen cars, and although she had given evidence on his behalf, testifying to having witnessed a meeting at which he had agreed to look after a car for a friend-a skein of fabrication-she knew that he was every bit as guilty as the prosecution had made him out to be. Indeed, the crimes for which he received his five-year prison sentence were probably only a fraction of those he had committed. But that was not the point: she had been outraged at his conviction, and her outrage had taken the form of a prolonged shouting and gesturing at the police officers in the court. The magistrate, who was on the point of leaving, had resumed her seat and ordered Florence to appear before her.
"This is a court of law," she had said. 'You must understand that you cannot shout at police officers, or anybody else in it. And moreover, you are lucky that the prosecutor has not charged you with perjury for all the lies you told here today."
Florence had been silenced, and had been allowed free. Yet this only increased her sense of injustice. The Republic of Botswana had made a great mistake in sending her brother to jail. There were far worse people than he, and why were they left untouched? Where was the justice of it if people like . . . The list was a long one, and, by curious coincidence, three of the men on it were known by her, two of them intimately.
And it was to one of these, Mr Philemon Leannye, that she now proposed to turn. He owed her a favour. She had once told the police that he was with her, when he was not, and this was after she had received her judicial warning for perjury and was wary of the authorities. She had met Philemon Leannye at a take-out stall in the African Mall. He was tired of bar girls, he had said, and he wanted to get to know some honest girls who would not take his money from him and make him buy drinks for them.
"Somebody like you," he had said, charmingly.
She had been flattered, and their acquaintance had blossomed. Months might go by when she would not see him, but he would appear from time to time and bring her presents-a silver clock once, a bag (with the purse still in it), a bottle of Cape Brandy. He lived over at Old Naledi, with a woman by whom he had had three children.
"She is always shouting at me, that woman," he complained. "I can't do anything right as far as she is concerned. I give her money every month but she always says that the children are hungry and how is she to buy the food? She is never satisfied."
Florence was sympathetic.
"You should leave her and marry me," she said. "I am not one to shout at a man. I would make a good wife for a man like you."
Her suggestion had been serious, but he had treated it as a joke, and had cuffed her playfully.
"You would be just as bad," he said. "Once women are married to men, they start to complain. It is a well-known fact. Ask any married man."
So their relationship remained casual, but, after her risky and rather frightening interview with the police-an interview in which his alibi was probed for over three hours-she felt that there was an obligation which one day could be called in.
"Philemon," she said to him, lying beside him on Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni's bed one hot afternoon. "I want you to get me a gun."
He laughed, but became serious when he turned over and saw her expression.
"What are you planning to do? Shoot Mr J.L.B. Matekoni? Next time he comes into the kitchen and complains about the food, you shoot him? Hah!"
"No. I am not planning to shoot anybody. I want the gun to put in somebody's house. Then I will tell the police that there is a gun there and they will come and find it."
 "And so I don't get my gun back?"
"No. The police will take it. But they will also take the person whose house it was in. What happens if you are found with an illegal gun?"
Philemon lit a cigarette and puffed the air straight up towards Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's ceiling.
"They don't like illegal weapons here. You get caught with an illegal gun and you go to prison. That's it. No hanging about.  They don't want this place to become like Johannesburg."
Florence smiled. "I am glad that they are so strict about guns. That is what I want."
Philemon extracted a fragment of tobacco from the space between his two front teeth. "So," he said. "How do I pay for this gun? Five hundred pula. Minimum. Somebody has to bring it over from Johannesburg. You can't pick them up here so easily."
"I have not got five hundred pula," she said. "Why not steal the gun? You've got contacts. Get one of your boys to do it." She paused before continuing. "Remember that I helped you. That was not easy for me."
He studied her carefully. "You really want this?" "Yes," she said. "It's really important to me." He stubbed his cigarette out and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.
"All right," he said. "I'll get you a gun. But remember that if anything goes wrong, you didn't get the gun from me."
"I shall say I found it," said Florence. "I shall say that it was lying in the bush over near the prison. Maybe it was something to do with the prisoners."
"Sounds reasonable," said Philemon. "When do you want it?" "As soon as you can get it," she replied.
"I can get you one tonight," he said. "As it happens, I have a spare one. You can have that."
She sat up and touched the back of his neck gently. 'You are a very kind man. You can come and see me anytime, you know. Anytime. I am always happy to see you and make you happy."
"You are a very fine girl," he said, laughing. "Very bad. Very wicked. Very clever."

HE DELIVERED the gun, as he had promised, wrapped in a wax-proof parcel, which he put at the bottom of a voluminous OK Bazaars plastic bag, underneath a cluster of old copies of Ebony magazine. She unwrapped it in his presence and he started to explain how the safety catch operated, but she cut him short.
"I'm not interested in that," she said. "All I'm interested in is this gun, and these bullets."
He had handed her, separately, nine rounds of stubby, heavy ammunition. The bullets shone, as if each had been polished for its task, and she found herself attracted to their feel. They would make a fine necklace, she thought, if drilled through the base and threaded through with nylon string or perhaps a silver chain.
Philemon showed her how to load bullets into the magazine and how to wipe the gun afterwards, to remove fingerprints. Then he gave her a brief caress, planted a kiss on her cheek, and left. The smell of his hair oil, an exotic rum-like smell, lingered in the air, as it always did when he visited her, and she felt a stab of regret for their languid afternoon and its pleasures. If she went to his house and shot his wife, would he marry her? Would he see her as his liberator, or the slayer of the mother of his children? It was difficult to tell.
Besides, she could never shoot anybody. She was a Christian, and she did not believe in killing people. She thought of herself as a good person, who was simply forced, by circumstances, to do things that good people did not do-or which ihey claimed they did not do. She knew better, of course. Everybody cut some corners, and if she was proposing to deal with Mma Ramotswe in this unconventional way, it was only because it was necessary to use such measures against somebody who was so patently a threat to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. How could he defend himself against a woman as determined as that? It was clear that strong steps had to be taken, and a few years in prison would teach that woman to be more respectful of the rights of others. That interfering detective woman was the author of her own misfortune; she only had herself to blame.

NOW, THOUGHT Florence, I have obtained a gun. This gun must now be put into the place that I have planned for it, which is a certain house in Zebra Drive.
To do this, another favour had to be called in. A man known to her simply as Paul, a man who came to her for conversation and affection, had borrowed money from her two years previously. It was not a large sum, but he had never paid it back. He might have forgotten about it, but she had not, and now he would be reminded. And if he proved difficult, he, too, had a wife who did not know about the social visits that her husband paid to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's house. A threat to reveal these might encourage compliance.
It was money, though, that had secured agreement. She mentioned the loan, and he stuttered out his inability to pay.
"Every pula I have has to be accounted for," he said. "We have to pay the hospital for one of the children. He keeps getting ill. I cannot spare any money. I will pay you back one day."
She nodded her understanding. "It will be easy to forget," she said. "I shall forget this money if you do something for me."
He had stared at her suspiciously. "You go to an empty house-nobody will be there. You break a window in the kitchen and you get in."
"I am not a thief," he interrupted. "I do not steal."
"But I am not asking you to steal," she said. "What kind of thief goes into a house and puts something into it? That is not a thief!"
She explained that she wanted a parcel left in a cupboard somewhere, tucked away where it could not be found.
"I want to keep something safe," she said. "This thing will be safe there."
He had cavilled at the idea, but she mentioned the loan again, and he capitulated. He would go the following afternoon, at a time when everybody was at work. She had done her homework: there would not even be a maid at the house, and there was no dog.
"It couldn't be easier," she promised him. 'You will get it done in fifteen minutes. In. Out."
She handed him the parcel. The gun had been replaced in its wax-proof paper and this had been itself wrapped in a further layer of plain brown paper. The wrapping disguised the nature of the contents, but the parcel was still weighty and he was suspicious.
"Don't ask," she said. "Don't ask and then you won't know."
It's a gun, he thought. She wants me to plant a gun in that house in Zebra Drive.
"I don't want to carry this thing about with me," he said. "It is very dangerous. I know that it's a gun and I know what happens to you if the police find you with a gun. I do not want to go to jail. I will fetch it from you at the Matekoni house tomorrow.
She thought for a moment. She could take the gun with her to work, tucked away in a plastic bag. If he wished to fetch it from her from there, then she had no objection. The important thing was to get it into the Ramotswe house and then, two days later, to make that telephone call to the police.
"All right," she said. "I will put it back in its bag and take it with me. You come at 2:30. He will have gone back to his garage by then."
He watched her replace the parcel in the OK Bazaars bag in which it had first arrived.
"Now," she said. "You have been a good man and I want to make you happy."
He shook his head. "I am too nervous to be happy. Maybe some other time."

THE FOLLOWING afternoon, shortly after two o'clock, Paul Mon-sopati, a senior clerk at the Gaborone Sun Hotel, and a man marked by the hotel management for further promotion, slipped into the office of one of the hotel secretaries and asked her to leave the room for a few minutes.
"I have an important telephone call to make," he said. "It is a private matter. To do with a funeral."
The secretary nodded, and left the room. People were always dying and funerals, which were eagerly attended by every distant relative who was able to do so, and by almost every casual acquaintance, required a great deal of planning.
Paul picked up the telephone receiver and dialled a number which he had written out on a piece of paper.
"I wish to speak to an Inspector," he said. "Not a sergeant. I want an Inspector."
"Who are you, Rra?"
"That is not important. You get me an Inspector, or you will be in trouble."
Nothing was said, and, after a few minutes, a new voice came on the line.
"Now listen to me, please, Rra," said Paul. "I cannot speak for long. I am a loyal citizen of Botswana. I am against crime."
"Good," said the Inspector. "That is what we like to hear."
"Well," said Paul. "If you go to a certain house you will find that there is a lady there who has an illegal firearm. She is one who sells these weapons. It will be in a white OK Bazaars bag. You will catch her if you go right now. She is the one, not the man who lives in that house. It is in her bag, and she will have it with her in the kitchen. That is all I have to say."
He gave the address of the house and then rang off. At the other end of the line, the Inspector smiled with satisfaction. This would be an easy arrest, and he would be congratulated for doing something about illegal weapons. One might complain about the public and about their lack of a sense of duty, but every so often something like this happened and a conscientious citizen restored one's faith in ordinary members of the public. There should be awards for these people. Awards and a cash prize. Five hundred pula at least.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FAMILY

MR J.L.B. Matekoni was aware of the fact that he was standing directly under the branch of an acacia tree. He looked up, and saw for a moment, in utter clarity, the details of the leaves against the emptiness of the sky. Drawn in upon themselves for the midday heat, the leaves were like tiny hands clasped in prayer; a bird, a common butcher bird, scruffy and undistinguished, was perched farther up the branch, claws clasped tight, black eyes darting. It was the sheer enormity of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's plight that made this perception so vivid; as a condemned man might peep out of his cell on his last morning and see the familiar, fading world. He looked down, and saw that Mma Ramotswe was still there, standing some ten feet away, her expression one of bemused puzzlement. She knew that he worked for the orphan farm, and she was aware of Mma Silvia Potokwane's persuasive ways. She would be imagining, he thought, that here was Mr J.L.B. Matekoni taking two of the orphans out for the day and arranging for them to have their photographs taken. She would not be imagining that here was Mr J.L.B. Matekoni with his two new foster children, soon to be her foster children too.
Mma Ramotswe broke the silence. "What are you doing?" she said simply. It was an entirely reasonable question-the sort of question that any friend or indeed fiancee may ask of another. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked down at the children. The girl had placed her photograph in a plastic carrier bag that was attached to the side of her wheelchair; the boy was clutching his photograph to his chest, as if Mma Ramotswe might wish to take it from him.
"These are two children from the orphan farm," stuttered Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "This one is the girl and this one is the boy."
Mma Ramotswe laughed. "Well!" she said. "So that is it. That is very helpful."
The girl smiled and greeted Mma Ramotswe politely.
"I am called Motholeli," she said. "My brother is called Puso. These are the names that we have been given at the orphan farm."
Mma Ramotswe nodded. "I hope that they are looking after you well, there. Mma Potokwane is a kind lady."
"She is kind," said the girl. "Very kind."
She looked as if she was about to say something else, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni broke in rapidly.
"I have had the children's photographs taken," he explained, and turning to the girl, he said: "Show them to Mma Ramotswe, Motholeli."
The girl propelled her chair forward and passed the photograph to Mma Ramotswe, who admired it.
"That is a very nice photograph to have," she said. "I have only one or two photographs of myself when I was your age. If ever I am feeling old, I go and take a look at them and I think that maybe I am not so old after all."
"You are still young," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "We are not old these days until we are seventy-maybe more. It has all changed."
"That's what we like to think," chuckled Mma Ramotswe, passing the photograph back to the girl. "Is Mr J.L.B. Matekoni taking you back now, or are you going to eat in town?"
"We have been shopping," Mr J.L.B. Matekoni blurted out. "We may have one or two other things to do."
"We will go back to his house soon," the girl said. "We are living with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni now. We are staying in his house."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni felt his heart thump wildly against his chest. I am going to have a heart attack, he thought. I am going to die now. And for a moment he felt immense regret that he would never marry Mma Ramotswe, that he would go to his grave a bachelor, that the children would be twice orphaned, that Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors would close. But his heart did not stop, but continued to beat, and Mma Ramotswe and all the physical world remained stubbornly there.
Mma Ramotswe looked quizzically at Mr J.L.B, Matekoni.
"They are staying in your house?" she said. "This is a new development. Have they just come?"
He nodded bleakly. "Yesterday," he said.
Mma Ramotswe looked down at the children and then back at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
"I think that we should have a talk," she said. "You children stay here for a moment. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and I are going to the post office."
There was no escape. Head hanging, like a schoolboy caught in delinquency, he followed Mma Ramotswe to the corner of the post office, where before the stacked rows of private postal boxes, he faced the judgement and sentence that he knew were his lot. She would divorce him-if that was the correct term for the breakup of an engagement. He had lost her because of his dishonesty and stupidity-and it was all Mma Silvia Potokwane's fault. Women like that were always interfering in the lives of others, forcing them to do things; and then matters went badly astray and lives were ruined in the process.
Mma Ramotswe put down her basket of letters.
"Why did you not tell me about these children?" she asked. "What have you done?"
He hardly dared meet her gaze. "I was going to tell you," he said. "I was out at the orphan farm yesterday. The pump was playing up. It's so old. Then their minibus needs new brakes. 1 have tried to fix those brakes, but they are always giving problems. We shall have to try and find new parts, I have told them that, but ..."
"Yes, yes," pressed Mma Ramotswe. "You have told me about those brakes before. But what about these children?"
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sighed. "Mma Potokwane is a very strong woman. She told me that I should take some foster children. I did not mean to do it without talking to you, but she would not listen to me. She brought in the children and I really had no alternative. It was very hard for me."
He stopped. A man passed on his way to his postal box, fumbling in his pocket for his key, muttering something to himself. Mma Ramotswe glanced at the man and then looked back at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
"So," she said, "you agreed to take these children. And now they think that they are going to stay." "Yes, I suppose so," he mumbled. "And how long for?" asked Mma Ramotswe. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni took a deep breath. "For as long as they need a home," he said. "Yes, I offered them that."
Unexpectedly he felt a new confidence. He had done nothing wrong. He had not stolen anything, or killed anybody, or committed adultery. He had just offered to change the lives of two poor children who had had nothing and who would now be loved and looked after. If Mma Ramotswe did not like that, well there was nothing he could do about it now. He had been impetuous, but his impetuosity had been in a good cause.
Mma Ramotswe suddenly laughed. "Well, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni," she said. "Nobody could say of you that you are not a kind man. You are, I think, the kindest man in Botswana. What other man would do that? I do not know of one, not one single one. Nobody else would do that. Nobody."
He stared at her. "You are not cross?"
"I was," she said. "But only for a little while. One minute maybe. But then I thought: Do I want to marry the kindest man in the country? I do. Can I be a mother for them? I can. That is what I thought, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni."
He looked at her incredulously. "You are a very kind woman yourself, Mma. You have been very kind to me."
"We must not stand here and talk about kindness," she said. "There are those two children there. Let's take them back to Zebra Drive and show them where they are going to live. Then this afternoon I can come and collect them from your house and bring them to mine. Mine is more ..."
She stopped herself, but he did not mind.
"I know that Zebra Drive is more comfortable," he said. "And it would be better for them to be looked after by you."
They walked back to the children, together, companionably.
"I'm going to marry this lady," announced Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "She will be your mother soon."
The boy looked startled, but the girl lowered her eyes respectfully.
"Thank you, Mma," she said. "We shall try to be good children for you."
"That is good," said Mma Ramotswe. "We shall be a very happy family. I can tell it already."
Mma Ramotswe went off to fetch her tiny white van, taking the boy with her. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni pushed the girl's wheelchair back to the old truck, and they drove over to Zebra Drive, where Mma Ramotswe and Puso were already waiting for them by the time they arrived. The boy was excited, rushing out to greet his sister.
"This is a very good house," he cried out. "Look, there are trees, and melons. I am having a room at the back."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni stood back as Mma Ramotswe showed the children round the house. Everything that he had felt about her was, in his mind, now confirmed beyond doubt. Obed Ramotswe, her father, who had brought her up after the death of her mother, had done a very fine job. He had given Botswana one of its finest ladies. He was a hero, perhaps without ever knowing it.
While Mma Ramotswe was preparing lunch for the children, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni telephoned the garage to check that the apprentices were managing to deal with the chores with which he had left them. The younger apprentice answered, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni knew immediately from his tone that there was something seriously wrong. The young man's voice was artificially high and excited.
"I am glad that you telephoned, Rra," he said. "The police came. They wanted to speak to you about your maid. They have arrested her and she has gone off to the cells. She had a gun in her bag. They are very cross."
The apprentice had no further information, and so Mr J|.L.B. Matekoni put down the receiver. His maid had been armed! He had suspected her of a great deal-of dishonesty, and possibly worse-but not of being armed. What was she up to in her spare time-armed robbery? Murder?
He went into the kitchen, where Mma Ramotswe was boiling up squares of pumpkin in a large enamel pot.
"My maid has been arrested and taken off to prison," he said flatly. "She had a gun. In a bag."
Mma Ramotswe put down her spoon. The pumpkin was boiling satisfactorily and would soon be tender. "I am not surprised," she said. "That was a very dishonest woman. The police have caught up with her at last. She was not too clever for them."

MR J.L.B. Matekoni and Mma Ramotswe decided that afternoon that life was becoming too complicated for both of them and that they should declare the rest of the day to be a day of simple activities, centred around the children. To this end, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni telephoned the apprentices and told them to close the garage until the following morning.
"I have been meaning to give you time off to study," he said. "Well, you can have some study time this afternoon. Put up a sign and say that we shall reopen at eight tomorrow."
To Mma Ramotswe he said: "They won't study. They'll go off chasing girls. There is nothing in those young men's heads. Nothing."
"Many young people are like that," she said. "They think only of dances and clothes, and loud music. That is their life. We were like that too, remember?"
Her own telephone call to the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency had brought a confident Mma Makutsi to the line, who had explained to her that she had completed the investigation of the Badule matter and that all that required to be done was to determine what to do with the information she had gathered. They would have to talk about that, said Mma Ramotswe. She had feared that the investigation would produce a truth that would be far from simple in its moral implications. There were times when ignorance was more comfortable than knowledge.
The pumpkin, though, was ready, and it was time to sit down at the table, as a family for the first time.
Mma Ramotswe said grace.
"We are grateful for this pumpkin and this meat," she said. "There are brothers and sisters who do not have good food on their table, and we think of them, and wish pumpkin and meat for them in the future. And we thank the Lord who has brought these children into our lives so that we might be happy and they might have a home with us. And we think of what a happy day this is for the late mother and the late daddy of these children, who are watching this from above."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni could add nothing to this grace, which he thought was perfect in every respect. It expressed his own feelings entirely, and his heart was too full of emotion to allow him to speak. So he was silent.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SEAT OF LEARNING

THE MORNING is the best time to address a problem, thought Mma Ramotswe. One is at one's freshest in the first hours of the working day, when the sun is still low and the air is sharp. That is the time to ask oneself the major questions; a time of clarity and reason, unencumbered by the heaviness of the day.
"I have read your report," said Mma Ramotswe, when Mma Makutsi arrived for work. "It is a very full one, and very well written. Well done."
Mma Makutsi acknowledged the compliment graciously.
"I was happy that my first case was not a difficult one," she said. "At least it was not difficult to find out what needed to be found out. But those questions which I put at the end-they are the difficult bit."
"Yes," said Mma Ramotswe, glancing down at the piece of paper. "The moral questions."
"I don't know how to solve them," said Mma Makutsi. "If I think that one answer is correct, then I see all the difficulties with that. Then I consider the other answer, and I see another set of difficulties."
She looked expectantly at Mma Ramotswe, who grimaced. "It is not easy for me either," the older woman said. "Just because I am a bit older than you does not mean that I have the answer to every dilemma that comes along. As you get older, in fact, you see more sides to a situation. Things are more clear-cut at your age." She paused, then added: "Mind you, remember that I am not quite forty. I am not all that old." "No," said Mma Makutsi. "That is just about the right age for a person to be. But this problem we have; it is all very troubling. If we tell Badule about this man and he puts a stop to the whole thing, then the boy's school fees will not be paid. That will be the end of this very good chance that he is getting. That would not be best for the boy."
Mma Ramotswe nodded. "I see that," she said. "On the other hand we can't lie to Mr Badule. It is unethical for a detective to lie to the client. You can't do it."
"I can understand that," said Mma Makutsi. "But there are times, surely, when a lie is a good thing. What if a murderer came to your house and asked you where a certain person was? And what if you knew where that person was, would it be wrong to say. 'I do not know anything about that person. I do not know where he is.' Would that not be a lie?"
"Yes. But then you have no duty to tell the truth to that murderer. So you can lie to him. But you do have a duty to tell the truth to your client, or to your spouse, or to the police. That is all different."
"Why? Surely if it is wrong to lie, then it is always wrong to lie. If people could lie when they thought it was the right thing to do, then we could never tell when they meant it." Mma Makutsi, stopped, and pondered for a few moments before continuing. "One person's idea of what is right may be quite different from another's. If each person can make up his own rule . . ." She shrugged, leaving the consequences unspoken.
"Yes," said Mma Ramotswe. "You are right about that. That's the trouble with the world these days. Everyone thinks that they can make their own decisions about what is right and wrong. Everybody thinks that they can forget the old Botswana morality. But they can't."
"But the real problem here," said Mma Makutsi, "is whether we should tell him everything. What if we say: 'You are right; your wife is unfaithful,' and leave it at that? Have we done our duty? We are not lying, are we? We are just not telling all the truth."
Mma Ramotswe stared at Mma Makutsi. She had always valued her secretary's comments, but she had never expected that she would make such a moral mountain out of the sort of little problem that detectives encountered every day. It was messy work. You helped other people with their problems; you did not have to come up with a complete solution. What they did with the information was their own affair. It was their life, and they had to lead it.
But as she thought about this, she realised that she had done far more than that in the past. In a number of her successful cases, she had gone beyond the finding of information. She had made decisions about the outcome, and these decisions had often proved to be momentous ones. For example, in the case of the woman whose husband had a stolen Mercedes-Benz, she had arranged for the return of the car to its owner. In the case of the fraudulent insurance claims by the man with thirteen fingers, she had made the decision not to report him to the police. That was a decision which had changed a life. He may have become honest after she had given him this chance, but he may not. She could not tell. But what she had done was to offer him a chance, and that may have made a difference. So she did interfere in other people's lives, and it was not true that all that she did was provide information.
In this case, she realised that the real issue was the fate of the boy. The adults could look after themselves; Mr Badule could cope with a discovery of adultery (in his heart of hearts he already knew that his wife was unfaithful); the other man could go back to his wife on his bended knees and take his punishment (perhaps be hauled back to live in that remote village with his Catholic wife), and as for the fashionable lady, well, she could spend a bit more time in the butchery, rather than resting on that big bed on Nyerere Drive. The boy, though, could not be left to the mercy of events. She would have to ensure that whatever happened, he did not suffer for the bad behaviour of his mother.
Perhaps there was a solution which would mean that the boy could stay at school. If one looked at the situation as it stood, was there anybody who was really unhappy? The fashionable wife was very happy; she had a rich lover and a big bed to lie about in. The rich lover bought her fashionable clothes and other things which fashionable ladies tend to enjoy. The rich lover was happy, because he had a fashionable lady and he did not have to spend too much time with his devout wife. The devout wife was happy because she was living where she wanted to live, presumably doing what she liked doing, and had a husband who came home regularly, but not so regularly as to be a nuisance to her. The boy was happy, because he had two fathers, and was getting a good education at an expensive school.
That left the Mr Letsenyane Badule. Was he happy, or if he was unhappy could he be made to be happy again without any change in the situation? If they could find some way of doing that, then there was no need for the boy's circumstances to change. But how might this be achieved? She could not tell Mr Badule that the boy was not his-that would be too upsetting, too cruel, and presumably the boy would be upset to learn this as well. It was probable that the boy did not realize who his real father was; after all, even if they had identical large noses, boys tend not to notice things like that and he may have thought nothing of it. Mma Ramotswe decided that there was no need to do anything about that; ignorance was probably the best state for the boy. Later on, with his school fees all paid, he could start to study family noses and draw his own conclusions.
"It's Mr Badule," Mma Ramotswe pronounced. "We have to make him happy. We have to tell him what is going on, but we must make him accept it. If he accepts it, then the whole problem goes away."
"But he's told us that he worries about it," objected Mma Makutsi.
"He worries because he thinks it is a bad thing for his wife to be seeing another man," Mma Ramotswe countered. "We shall persuade him otherwise."
Mma Makutsi looked doubtful, but was relieved that Mma Ramotswe had taken charge again. No lies were to be told, and, if they were, they were not going to be told by her. Anyway, Mma Ramotswe was immensely resourceful. If she believed that she could persuade Mr Badule to be happy, then there was a good chance that she could.

BUT THERE were other matters which required attention. There had been a letter from Mrs Curtin in which she asked whether Mma Ramotswe had unearthed anything. "I know it's early to be asking," she wrote, "but ever since I spoke to you, I have had the feeling that you would discover something for me. I don't wish to flatter you, Mma, but I had the feeling that you were one of these people who just knew. You don't have to reply to this letter; I know I should not be writing it at this stage, but I have to do something. You'll understand, Mma Ramotswe-I know you will."
The letter had touched Mma Ramotswe, as did all the pleas that she received from troubled people. She thought of the progress that had been made so far. She had seen the place and she had sensed that that was where that young man's life had ended. In a sense, then, she had reached the conclusion right at the beginning. Now she had to work backwards and find out why he was lying there-as she knew he was-in that dry earth, on the edge of the Great Kalahari. It was a lonely grave, so far away from his people, and he had been so young. How had it come to this? Wrong had been done at some point, and if one wanted to find out what wrong had occurred, then one had to find the people who were capable of doing that wrong. Mr Oswald Ranta.

THE TINY white van moved gingerly over the speed bumps which were intended to deter fast and furious driving by the university staff. Mma Ramotswe was a considerate driver and was ashamed of the bad driving which made the roads so perilous. Botswana, of course, was much safer than other countries in that part of Africa. South Africa was very bad; there were aggressive drivers there, who would shoot you if you crossed them, and they were often drunk, particularly after payday. If payday fell on a Friday night, then it was foolhardy to set out on the roads at all. Swaziland was even worse. The Swazis loved speed, and the winding road between Manzini and Mbabane, on which she had once spent a terrifying half hour, was a notorious claimant of motoring life. She remembered coming across a poignant item in an odd copy of The Times of Swaziland, which had displayed a picture of a rather mousy-looking man, small and insignificant, under which was printed the simple legend The late Mr Richard Mavuso (46). Mr Mavuso, who had a tiny head and a small, neatly trimmed moustache, would have been beneath the notice of most beauty queens and yet, unfortunately, as the newspaper report revealed, he had been run over by one.
Mma Ramotswe had been strangely affected by the report. Local man, Mr Richard Mavuso (above) was run over on Friday night by the Runner-up to Miss Swaziland. The well-known Beauty Queen, Miss Gladys Lapelala, of Manzini, ran over Mr Mavuso as he was trying to cross the road in Mbabane, where he was a clerk in the Public Works Department.
That was all that the report had said, and Mma Ramotswe wondered why she was so affected by it. People were being run over all the time, and not much was made of it. Did it make a difference that one was run over by a beauty queen? And was it sad because Mr Mavuso was such a small and insignificant man, and the beauty queen so big, and important? Perhaps such an event was a striking metaphor for life's injustices; the powerful, the glamorous, the feted, could so often with impunity push aside the insignificant, the timorous.
She nosed the tiny white van into a parking space behind the Administration Buildings and looked about her. She passed the university grounds every day, and was familiar with the cluster of white, sun-shaded buildings that sprawled across the several hundred-acre site near the old airfield. Yet she had never had the occasion to set foot there, and now, faced with a rather bewildering array of blocks, each with its impressive, rather alien name, she felt slightly overawed. She was not an uneducated woman, but she had no BA. And this was a place where everybody one came across was either a BA or BSc or even more than that. There were unimaginably learned people here; scholars like Professor Tlou, who had written a history of Botswana and a biography of Seretse Khama. Or there was Dr Bojosi Otloghile, who had written a book on the High Court of Botswana, which she had bought, but not yet read. One might come across such a person turning a corner in one of these buildings and they would look just like anybody else. But their heads would contain rather more than the heads of the average person, which were not particularly full of very much for a great deal of the time.
She looked at a board which proclaimed itself a map of the campus. Department of Physics that way; Department of Theology that way; Institute of Advanced Studies first right. And then, rather more helpfully, Enquiries. She followed the arrow for Enquiries and came to a modest, prefabricated building, tucked away behind Theology and in front of African Languages. She knocked at the door and entered.

An emaciated woman was sitting behind a desk, trying to unscrew the cap of a pen.
"I am looking for Mr Ranta," she said. "I believe he works here."
The woman looked bored. "Dr Ranta," she said. "He is not just plain Mr Ranta. He is Dr Ranta."
"I am sorry," said Mma Ramotswe. "I would not wish to offend him. Where is he, please?"
"They seek him here, they seek him there," said the woman. "He is here one moment, the next moment, he is nowhere. That's Dr Ranta."
"But will he be here at this moment?" said Mma Ramotswe. "I am not worried about the next moment."
The woman arched an eyebrow. "You could try his office. He has an office here. But most of the time he spends in his bedroom."
"Oh," said Mma Ramotswe. "He is a ladies' man, this Dr Ranta?"
"You could say that," said the woman. "And one of these days the University Council will catch him and tie him up with rope. But in the meantime, nobody dares touch him."
Mma Ramotswe was intrigued. So often, people did one's work for one, as this woman was now doing.
"Why can people not touch him?" asked Mma Ramotswe.
"The girls themselves are too frightened to speak," said the woman. "And his colleagues all have something to hide themselves. You know what these places are like."
Mma Ramotswe shook her head. "I am not a BA," she said. "I do not know."
"Well," said the woman, "I can tell you. They have a lot of people like Dr Ranta in them. You'll find out. I can speak to you about this because I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm going to a better job."
Mma Ramotswe was given instructions as to how to find Dr Ranta's office and she took her leave of the helpful receptionist. It was not a good idea on the university's part, she thought, to put that woman in the enquiry office. If she greeted any enquiry as to a member of staff with the gossip on that person, a visitor might get quite the wrong impression. Yet perhaps it was just because she was leaving the next day that she was talking like this; in which case, thought Mma Ramotswe, there was an opportunity.
"One thing, Mma," she said, as she reached the door. "It may be hard for anybody to deal with Dr Ranta because he hasn't done anything wrong. It may not be a good thing to interfere with students, but that may not be grounds for sacking him, at least it may not be these days. So maybe there's nothing that can be done."
She saw immediately that it was going to work, and that her surmise, that the receptionist had suffered at the hands of Dr Ranta, was correct.
"Oh yes, he has," she retorted, becoming suddenly animated. "He showed an examination paper to a student if she would oblige him. Yes! I'm the only one who knows it. The student was my cousin's daughter. She spoke to her mother, but she would not report it. But the mother told me."
"But you have no proof?" said Mma Ramotswe, gently. "Is that the problem?"
"Yes," said the receptionist. "There is no proof. He would lie his way out of it."
"And this girl, this Margaret, what did she do?"
"Margaret? Who is Margaret?"
"Your cousin's daughter," said Mma Ramotswe.
"She is not called Margaret," said the receptionist. "She is called Angel. She did nothing, and he got away with it. Men get away with it, don't they? Every time."
Mma Ramotswe felt like saying No. Not always, but she was short of time, and so she said goodbye for the second time and began to make her way to the Department of Economics.

THE DOOR was open. Mma Ramotswe looked at the small notice before she knocked: Dr Oswald Ranta, BSc (Econ.), (UB) PhD (Duke). If I am not in, you may leave a message with the Departmental Secretary. Students wishing to have essays returned should see their tutor or go to the Departmental Office.
She listened for the sound of voices from within the room and none came. She heard the click of the keys of a keyboard. Dr Ranta was in.
He looked up sharply as she knocked and edged the door open.
"Yes, Mma," he said. "What do you want?"
Mma Ramotswe switched from English to Setswana. "I would like to speak to you, Rra. Have you got a moment?"
He glanced quickly at his watch.
"Yes," he said, not impolitely. "But I haven't got forever. Are you one of my students?"
Mma Ramotswe made a self-deprecating gesture as she sat down on the chair which he had indicated. "No," she said. "I am not that educated. I did my Cambridge Certificate, but nothing after that. I was busy working for my cousin's husband's bus company, you see. I could not go on with my education."
"It is never too late, Mma," he said. "You could study. We have some very old students here. Not that you are very old, of course, but the point is that anybody can study." "Maybe," she said. "Maybe one day."
"You could study just about anything here," he went on. "Except medicine. We can't make doctors just yet." "Or detectives."
He looked surprised. "Detectives? You cannot study detection at a university."
She raised an eyebrow. "But I have read that at American universities there are courses in private detection. I have a book by . . ."
He cut her short. "Oh that! Yes, at American colleges you can take a course in anything. Swimming, if you like. But that's only at some of them. At the good places, places that we call Ivy League, you can't get away with that sort of nonsense. You have to study real subjects."
"Like logic?"
"Logic? Yes. You would study that for a philosophy degree. They taught logic at Duke, of course. Or they did when I was there."
He expected her to look impressed, and she tried to oblige him with a look of admiration. This, she thought, is a man who needs constant reassurance-hence all the girls.
"But surely that is what detection is all about. Logic, and a bit of psychology. If you know logic, you know how things should work; if you know psychology, you should know how people work."
He smiled, folding his hands across his stomach, as if preparing for a tutorial. As he did so, his gaze was running down Mma Ramotswe's figure, and she sensed it. She looked back at him, at the folded hands, and the sharp dresser's tie.
"So, Mma," he said. "I would like to spend a long time discussing philosophy with you. But I have a meeting soon and I must ask you to tell me what you wanted to talk about. Was it philosophy after all?"
She laughed. "I would not waste your time, Rra. You are a clever man, with many committees in your life. I am just a lady detective. I ..."
She saw him tense. The hands unfolded, and moved to the arms of the chair.
"You are a detective?" he asked. The voice was colder now.
She made a self-deprecating gesture. "It is only a small agency. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. It is over by Kgale Hill. You may have seen it."
"I do not go over there," he said. "I have not heard of you."
"Well, I wouldn't expect you to have heard of me, Rra. I am not well-known, unlike you."
His right hand moved uneasily to the knot of his tie.
"Why do you want to talk to me?" he asked. "Has somebody told you to come and speak to me?"
"No," she said. "It's not that."
She noticed that her answer relaxed him and the arrogance returned.
"Well then?" he said.
"I have come to ask you to talk about something that happened a long time ago. Ten years ago."
He stared at her. His look was guarded now, and she smelt off him that unmistakable, acrid smell of a person experiencing fear.
"Ten years is a long time. People do not remember."
"No," she conceded. "They forget. But there are some things that are not easily forgotten. A mother, for example, will not forget her son."
As she spoke, his demeanour changed again. He got up from his chair, laughing.
"Oh," he said. "I see now. That American woman, the one who is always asking questions, is paying you to go round digging up the past again. Will she never give up? Will she never learn?"
"Learn what?" asked Mma Ramotswe. He was standing at the window, looking out on a group of students on the walkway below.
"Learn that there is nothing to be learned," he said. "That boy is dead. He must have wandered off into the Kalahari and got lost. Gone for a walk and never come back. It's easily done, you know. One thorn tree looks much like another, you know, and there are no hills down there to guide you. You get lost. Especially if you're a white man out of your natural element. What do you expect?"
"But I don't believe that he got lost and died," said Mma Ramotswe. "I believe that something else happened to him." He turned to face her. "Such as?" he snapped.
She shrugged her shoulders. "I am not sure exactly what. But how should I know? I was not there." She paused, before adding, almost under her breath. "You were."
She heard his breathing, as he returned to his chair. Down below, one of the students shouted something out, something about a jacket, and the others laughed. "You say I was there. What do you mean?" She held his gaze. "I mean that you were living there at the time. You were one of the people who saw him every day. You saw him on the day of his death. You must have some idea."
"I told the police at the time, and I have told the Americans who came round asking questions of all of us. I saw him that morning, once, and then again at lunchtime. I told them what we had for lunch. I described the clothes he was wearing. I told them everything."
As he spoke, Mma Ramotswe made her decision. He was lying. Had he been telling the truth, she would have brought the encounter to an end, but she knew now that her initial intuition had been right. He was lying as he spoke. It was easy to tell; indeed, Mma Ramotswe could not understand why everybody could not tell when another person was lying. In her eyes, it was so obvious, and Dr Ranta might as well have had an illuminated liar sign about his neck.
"I do not believe you, Rra," she said simply. "You are lying to me."
He opened his mouth slightly, and then closed it. Then, folding his hands over his stomach again, he leant back in his chair.
"Our talk has come to an end, Mma," he announced. "I am sorry that I cannot help you. Perhaps you can go home and study some more logic. Logic will tell you that when a person says he cannot help you, you will get no help. That, after all, is logical."
He spoke with a sneer, pleased with his elegant turn of phrase.
"Very well, Rra," said Mma Ramotswe. 'You could help me, or rather you could help that poor American woman. She is a mother. You had a mother. I could say to you, Think about that mother's feelings, but I know that with a person like you that makes no difference. You do not care about that woman. Not just because she is a white woman, from far away; you wouldn't care if she was a woman from your own village, would you?"
He grinned at her. "I told you. We have finished our talk."
"But people who don't care about others can sometimes be made to care," she said.
He snorted. "In a minute I am going to telephone the Administration and tell them that there is a trespasser in my room. I could say that I found you trying to steal something. I could do that, you know. In fact, I think that is just what I might do. We have had trouble with casual thieves recently and they would send the security people pretty quickly. You might have difficulty explaining it all, Mrs Logician."
"I wouldn't do that, Rra," she said. "You see, I know all about Angel."
The effect was immediate. His body stiffened and again she smelled the acrid odour, stronger now.
"Yes," she said. "I know about Angel and the examination paper. I have a statement back in my office. I can pull the chair from under you now, right now. What would you do in Gaborone as an unemployed university lecturer, Rra? Go back to your village? Help with the cattle again?"
Her words, she noted, were like axe blows. Extortion, she thought. Blackmail. This is how the blackmailer feels when he has his victim at his feet. Complete power.
"You cannot do that... I will deny , . . There is nothing to show . . ."
"I have all the proof they will need," she said. "Angel, and another girl who is prepared to lie and say that you gave her exam questions. She is cross with you and she will lie. What she says is not true, but there will be two girls with the same story. We detectives call that corroboration, Rra. Courts like corroboration. They call it similar fact evidence. Your colleagues in the Law Department will tell you all about such evidence. Go and speak to them. They will explain the law to you."
He moved his tongue between his teeth, as if to moisten his lips. She saw that, and she saw the damp patch of sweat under his armpits; one of his laces was undone, she noted, and the tie had a stain, coffee or tea.
"I do not like doing this, Rra," she said. "But this is my job. Sometimes I have to be tough and do things that I do not like doing. But what I am doing now has to be done because there is a very sad American woman who only wants to say goodbye to her son. I know you don't care about her, but I do, and I think that her feelings are more important than yours. So I am going to offer you a bargain. You tell me what happened and I shall promise you-and my word means what it says, Rra-I shall promise you that we hear nothing more about Angel and her friend."
His breathing was irregular; short gasps, like that of a person with obstructive airways disease-a struggling for breath.
"I did not kill him," he said. "I did not kill him."
"Now you are telling the truth," said Mma Ramotswe. "I can tell that. But you must tell me what happened and where his body is. That is what I want to know."
"Are you going to go to the police and tell them that I withheld information? If you will, then I will just face whatever happens about that girl."
"No, I am not going to go to the police. This story is just for his mother. That is all."
He closed his eyes. "I cannot talk here. You can come to my house."
"I will come this evening."
"No," he said. "Tomorrow."
"I shall come this evening," she said. "That woman has waited ten years. She must not wait any longer."
"All right. I shall write down the address. You can come tonight at nine o'clock."
"I shall come at eight," said Mma Ramotswe. "Not every woman will do what you tell her to do, you know."
She left him, and as she made her way back to the tiny white van she listened to her own breathing and felt her own heart thumping wildly. She had no idea where she had found the courage, but it had been there, like the water at the bottom of a disused quarry-unfathomably deep.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AT TLOKWENG ROAD SPEEDY MOTORS

WHILE MMA Ramotswe indulged in the pleasures of blackmail-for that is what it was, even if in a good cause, and therein lay another moral problem which she and Mma Makutsi might chew over in due course-Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, garagiste to His Excellency, the British High Commissioner to Botswana, took his two foster children to the garage for the afternoon. The girl, Motholeli, had begged him to take them so that she could watch him work, and he, bemused, had agreed. A garage workshop was no place for children, with all those heavy tools and pneumatic hoses, but he could detail one of the apprentices to watch over them while he worked. Besides, it might be an idea to expose the boy to the garage at this stage so that he could get a taste for mechanics at an early age. An understanding of cars and engines had to be instilled early; it was not something that could be picked up later. One might become a mechanic at any age, of course, but not everybody could have a feeling for engines. That was something that had to be acquired by osmosis, slowly, over the years.
He parked in front of his office door so that Motholeli could get into the wheelchair in the shade. The boy dashed off immediately to investigate a tap at the side of the building and had to be called back.
"This place is dangerous," cautioned Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "You must stay with one of these boys over there."
He called over the younger apprentice, the one who constantly tapped him on the shoulder with his greasy finger and ruined his clean overalls.
"You must stop what you are doing," he said. "You watch over these two while I am working. Make sure that they don't get hurt."
The apprentice seemed to be relieved by his new duties and beamed broadly at the children. He's the lazy one, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He would make a better nanny than a mechanic.
The garage was busy. There was a football team's minibus in for an overhaul and the work was challenging. The engine had been strained from constant overloading, but that was the case with every minibus in the country. They were always overloaded as the proprietors attempted to cram in every possible fare. This one, which needed new rings, had been belching acrid black smoke to the extent that the players were complaining about shortness of breath.
The engine was exposed and the transmission had been detached. With the help of the other apprentice, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni attached lifting tackle to the engine block and began to winch it out of the vehicle. Motholeli, watching intently from her wheelchair, pointed something out to her brother. He glanced briefly in the direction of the engine, but then looked away again. He was tracing a pattern in a patch of oil at his feet.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni exposed the pistons and the cylinders. Then, pausing, he looked over at the children.
"What is happening now, Rra?" called the girl. "Are you going to replace those rings there? What do they do? Are they important?"
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked at the boy. "You see, Puso? You see what I am doing?"
The boy smiled weakly.
"He is a drawing a picture in the oil," said the apprentice. "He is drawing a house."
The girl said: "May I come closer, Rra?" she said. "I will not get in the way."
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni nodded and, after she had wheeled herself across, he pointed out to her where the trouble lay.
"You hold this for me," he said. "There."
She took the spanner, and held it firmly.
"Good," he said. "Now you turn this one here. You see? Not too far. That's right."
He took the spanner from her and replaced it in his tray. Then he turned and looked at her. She was leaning forward in her chair, her eyes bright with interest. He knew that look; the expression of one who loves engines. It could not be faked; that younger apprentice, for example, did not have it, and that is why he would never be more than a mediocre mechanic. But this girl, this strange, serious child who had come into his life, had the makings of a mechanic. She had the art. He had never before seen it in a girl, but it was there. And why not? Mma Ramotswe had taught him that there is no reason why women should not do anything they wanted. She was undoubtedly right. People had assumed that private detectives would be men, but look at how well Mma Ramotswe had done. She had been able to use a woman's powers of observation and a woman's intuition to find out things that could well escape a man. So if a girl might aspire to becoming a detective, then why should she not aspire to entering the predominantly male world of cars and engines?
Motholeli raised her eyes, meeting his gaze, but still respectfully.
"You are not cross with me, Rra?" she said. "You do not think I am a nuisance?"
He reached forward and laid a hand gently on her arm. "Of course I am not cross," he said. "I am proud. I am proud that now I have a daughter who will be a great mechanic. Is that what you want? Am I right?"
She nodded modestly. "I have always loved engines," she said. "I have always liked to look at them. I have loved to work with screwdrivers and spanners. But I have never had the chance to do anything,"
"Well," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "That changes now. You can come with me on Saturday mornings and help here. Would you like that? We can make a special workbench for you-a low one-so that it is the right height for your chair." "You are very kind, Rra."
For the rest of the day, she remained at his side, watching each procedure, asking the occasional question, but taking care not to intrude. He tinkered and coaxed, until eventually the minibus engine, reinvigorated, was secured back in place and, when tested, produced no acrid black smoke.
"You see," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni proudly, pointing to the clear exhaust. "Oil won't burn off like that if it's kept in the right place. Tight seals. Good piston rings. Everything in its proper place."
Motholeli clapped her hands. "That van is happier now," she said.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni smiled. 'Yes," he agreed. "It is happier now."
He knew now, beyond all doubt, that she had the talent. Only those who really understood machinery could conceive of happiness in an engine; it was an insight which the non-mechanically minded simply lacked. This girl had it, while the younger apprentice did not. He would kick an engine, rather than talk to it, and he had often seen him forcing metal. You cannot force metal, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had told him time after time. If you force metal, it fights back. Remember that if you remember nothing else I have tried to teach you. Yet the apprentice would still strip bolts by turning the nut the wrong way and would bend flanges if they seemed reluctant to fall into proper alignment. No machinery could be treated that way.
This girl was different. She understood the feelings of engines, and would be a great mechanic one day-that was clear.
He looked at her proudly, as he wiped his hands on cotton lint. The future of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors seemed assured.