Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (10 page)

MMA MAKUTSI DEALS WITH THE
MAIL

T
HE SUCCESS of the first case heartened Mma Ramotswe. She had
now sent off for, and received, a manual on private detection and was going
through it chapter by chapter, taking copious notes. She had made no mistakes
in that first case, she thought. She had found out what information there was
to be had by a simple process of listing the likely sources and seeking them
out. That did not take a great deal of doing. Provided that one was methodical,
there was hardly any way in which one could go wrong.

Then she had
had a hunch about the crocodile and had followed it up. Again, the manual
endorsed this as perfectly acceptable practice. “Don’t disregard a
hunch,” it advised. “Hunches are another form of knowledge.”
Mma Ramotswe had liked that phrase and had mentioned it to Mma Makutsi. Her
secretary had listened carefully, and then typed the sentence out on her
typewriter and handed it to Mma Ramotswe.

Mma Makutsi was pleasant
company and could type quite well. She had typed out a report which Mma
Ramotswe had dictated on the Malatsi case and had typed out the bill for
sending to Mma Malatsi. But apart from that she had not really been called on
to do anything else and Mma Ramotswe wondered whether the business could really
justify employing a secretary.

And yet one had to. What sort of private
detective agency had no secretary? She would be a laughingstock without one,
and clients—if there were really going to be any more, which was
doubtful—could well be frightened away.

Mma Makutsi had the mail
to open, of course. There was no mail for the first three days. On the fourth
day, a catalogue was received, and a property tax demand, and on the fifth day
a letter which was intended for the previous owner.

Then, at the
beginning of the second week, she opened a white envelope dirty with finger
marks and read the letter out to Mma Ramotswe.

Dear Mma
Ramotswe,

I read about you in the newspaper and about how you
have opened this big new agency down there in town. I am very proud for
Botswana that we now have a person like you in this country.

I am the
teacher at the small school at Katsana Village, thirty miles from Gaborone,
which is near the place where I was born. I went to Teachers’ College
many years ago and I passed with a double distinction. My wife and I have two
daughters and we have a son of eleven. This boy to which I am referring has
recently vanished and has not been seen for two months.

We went to
the police. They made a big search and asked questions everywhere. Nobody knew
anything about our son. I took time off from the school and searched the land
around our village. We have some
kopjes
not too far away and there are
boulders and caves over there. I went into each one of those caves and looked
into every crevice. But there was no sign of my son.

He was a boy who
liked to wander, because he had a strong interest in nature. He was always
collecting rocks and things like that. He knew a lot about the bush and he
would never get into danger from stupidity. There are no leopards in these
parts anymore and we are too far away from the Kalahari for lions to
come.

I went everywhere, calling, calling, but my son never answered
me. I looked in every well of every farmer and village nearby and asked them to
check the water. But there was no sign of him.

How can a boy vanish
off the face of the Earth like this? If I were not a Christian, I would say
that some evil spirit had lifted him up and carried him off. But I know that
things like that do not really happen.

I am not a wealthy man. I
cannot afford the services of a private detective, but I ask you, Mma, in the
name of Jesus Christ, to help me in one small way. Please, when you are making
your enquiries about other things, and talking to people who might know what
goes on, please ask them if they have heard anything about a boy called
Thobiso, aged eleven years and four months, who is the son of the teacher at
Katsana Village. Please just ask them, and if you hear anything at all, please
address a note to the undersigned, myself, the teacher.

In
God’
s name, Ernest Molai Pakotati, Dip.Ed.

Mma
Makutsi stopped reading and looked across the room at Mma Ramotswe. For a
moment, neither spoke. Then Mma Ramotswe broke the silence.

“Do
you know anything about this?” she asked. “Have you heard anything
about a boy going missing?”

Mma Makutsi frowned. “I think
so. I think there was something in the newspaper about a search for a boy. I
think they thought he might have run away from home for some
reason.”

Mma Ramotswe rose to her feet and took the letter from
her secretary. She held it as one might hold an exhibit in
court—gingerly, so as not to disturb the evidence. It felt to her as if
the letter—a mere scrap of paper, so light in itself—was weighted
with pain.

“I don’t suppose there’s much I can
do,” she said quietly. “Of course I can keep my ears open. I can
tell the poor daddy that, but what else can I do? He will know the bush around
Katsana. He will know the people. I can’t really do very much for
him.”

Mma Makutsi seemed relieved. “No,” she said.
“We can’t help that poor man.”

A letter was dictated
by Mma Ramotswe, and Mma Makutsi typed it carefully into the typewriter. Then
it was sealed in an envelope, a stamp stuck on the outside, and it was placed
in the new red out-tray Mma Ramotswe had bought from the Botswana Book Centre.
It was the second letter to leave the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, the
first being Mma Malatsi’s bill for two hundred and fifty pula—the
bill on the top of which Mma Makutsi had typed: “Your late
husband—the solving of the mystery of his death.”

THAT EVENING, in the house in Zebra Drive, Mma
Ramotswe prepared herself a meal of stew and pumpkin. She loved standing in the
kitchen, stirring the pot, thinking over the events of the day, sipping at a
large mug of bush tea which she balanced on the edge of the stove. Several
things had happened that day, apart from the arrival of the letter. A man had
come in with a query about a bad debt and she had reluctantly agreed to help
him recover it. She was not sure whether this was the sort of thing which a
private detective should do—there was nothing in the manual about
it—but he was persistent and she found it difficult to refuse. Then there
had been a visit from a woman who was concerned about her husband.

“He comes home smelling of perfume,” she said, “And
smiling too. Why would a man come home smelling of perfume and
smiling?”

“Perhaps he is seeing another woman,”
ventured Mma Ramotswe.

The woman had looked at her aghast.

“Do you think he would do that? My husband?”

They had
discussed the situation and it was agreed that the woman would tackle her
husband on the subject.

“It’s possible that there is
another explanation,” said Mma Ramotswe reassuringly.

“Such
as?”

“Well …”

“Many men wear
perfume these days,” offered Mma Makutsi. “They think it makes them
smell good. You know how men smell.”

The client had turned in her
chair and stared at Mma Makutsi.

“My husband does not
smell,” she said. “He is a very clean man.”

Mma
Ramotswe had thrown Mma Makutsi a warning look. She would have to have a word
with her about keeping out of the way when clients were there.

But
whatever else had happened that day, her thoughts kept returning to the
teacher’s letter and the story of the missing boy. How the poor man must
have fretted—and the mother, too. He did not say anything about a mother,
but there must have been one, or a grandmother of course. What thoughts would
have been in their minds as each hour went past with no sign of the boy, and
all the time he could be in danger, stuck in an old mine shaft, perhaps, too
hoarse to cry out anymore while rescuers beat about above him. Or stolen
perhaps—whisked away by somebody in the night. What cruel heart could do
such a thing to an innocent child? How could anybody resist the boy’s
cries as he begged to be taken home? That such things could happen right there,
in Botswana of all places, made her shiver with dread.

She began to
wonder whether this was the right job for her after all. It was all very well
thinking that one might help people to sort out their difficulties, but then
these difficulties could be heartrending. The Malatsi case had been an odd one.
She had expected Mma Malatsi to be distraught when she showed her the evidence
that her husband had been eaten by a crocodile, but she had not seemed at all
put out. What had she said? But then I have lots to do. What an extraordinary,
unfeeling thing for somebody to say when she had just lost her husband. Did she
not value him more than that?

Mma Ramotswe paused, her spoon dipped
half below the surface of the simmering stew. When people were unmoved in that
way, Mma Christie expected the reader to be suspicious. What would Mma Christie
have thought if she had seen Mma Malatsi’s cool reaction, her virtual
indifference? She would have thought: This woman killed her husband!
That’s why she’s unmoved by the news of his death. She knew all
along that he was dead!

But what about the crocodile and the baptism,
and the other sinners? No, she must be innocent. Perhaps she wanted him dead,
and then her prayer was answered by the crocodile. Would that make you a
murderer in God’s eyes if something then happened? God would know, you
see, that you had wanted somebody dead because there are no secrets that you
can keep from God. Everybody knew that.

She stopped. It was time to
take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was
what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get
nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth.
That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A CONVERSATION WITH
MR
J.L.B. MATEKONI

T
HE BOOKS did not look good. At the end of the first
month of its existence, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was making a
convincing loss. There had been three paying clients, and two who came for
advice, received it, and declined to pay. Mma Malatsi had paid her bill for two
hundred and fifty pula; Happy Bapetsi had paid two hundred pula for the
exposure of her false father; and a local trader had paid one hundred pula to
find out who was using his telephone to make unauthorised long-distance calls
to Francistown. If one added this up it came to five hundred and fifty pula;
but then Mma Makutsi’s wages were five hundred and eighty pula a month.
This meant that there was a loss of thirty pula, without even taking into
account other overheads, such as the cost of petrol for the tiny white van and
the cost of electricity for the office.

Of course, businesses took
some time to get established—Mma Ramotswe understood this—but how
long could one go on at a loss? She had a certain amount of money left over
from her father’s estate, but she could not live on that forever. She
should have listened to her father; he had wanted her to buy a butchery, and
that would have been so much safer. What was the expression they used? A
blue-chip investment, that was it. But where was the excitement in that?

She thought of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy
Motors. Now that was a business which would be making a profit. There was no
shortage of customers, as everybody knew what a fine mechanic he was. That was
the difference between them, she thought; he knew what he was doing, whereas
she did not.

Mma Ramotswe had known Mr J.L.B. Matekoni for years. He
came from Mochudi, and his uncle had been a close friend of her father. Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni was forty-five—ten years older than Mma Ramotswe, but he
regarded himself as being a contemporary and often said, when making an
observation about the world: “For people of our age …”

He was a comfortable man, and she wondered why he had never married. He was
not handsome, but he had an easy, reassuring face. He would have been the sort
of husband that any woman would have liked to have about the house. He would
fix things and stay in at night and perhaps even help with some of the domestic
chores—something that so few men would ever dream of doing.

But
he had remained single, and lived alone in a large house near the old airfield.
She sometimes saw him sitting on his verandah when she drove past—Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni by himself, sitting on a chair, staring out at the trees that
grew in his garden. What did a man like that think about? Did he sit there and
reflect on how nice it would be to have a wife, with children running around
the garden, or did he sit there and think about the garage and the cars he had
fixed? It was impossible to tell.