Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (13 page)

She walked down the path and stopped briefly to talk to another
girl, who was waiting under a tree for her parents to collect her. They chatted
for a few minutes, and then Nandira walked off towards the school gates.

Mma Ramotswe waited a few moments, and then got out of the van. Once
Nandira was out on the road, Mma Ramotswe followed her slowly. There were
several people about, and there was no reason why she should be conspicuous. On
a late winter afternoon it was quite pleasant to walk down the road; a month or
so later it would be too hot, and then she could well appear out of place.

She followed the girl down the road and round the corner. It had become
clear to her that Nandira was not going directly home, as the Patel house was
in the opposite direction to the route she had chosen. Nor was she going into
town, which meant that she must be going to meet somebody at a house somewhere.
Mma Ramotswe felt a glow of satisfaction. All she would probably have to do was
to find the house and then it would be child’s play to get the name of
the owner, and the boy. Perhaps she could even go to Mr Patel this evening and
reveal the boy’s identity. That would impress him, and it would be a very
easily earned fee.

Nandira turned another corner. Mma Ramotswe held
back a little before following her. It would be easy to become over-confident
following an innocent child, and she had to remind herself of the rules of
pursuit. The manual on which she relied,
The Principles of Private
Investigation
by Clovis Andersen, stressed that one should never crowd
one’s subject. “Keep a long rein,” wrote Mr Andersen,
“even if it means losing the subject from time to time. You can always
pick up the trail later. And a few minutes of non-eye contact is better than an
angry confrontation.”

Mma Ramotswe judged that it was now time to
go round the corner. She did so, expecting to see Nandira several hundred yards
down the road, but when she looked down it, the road was empty—non-eye
contact, as Clovis Andersen called it, had set in. She turned round, and looked
in the other direction. There was a car in the distance, coming out of the
driveway of a house, and nothing else.

Mma Ramotswe was puzzled. It was
a quiet road, and there were not more than three houses on either side of
it—at least in the direction in which Nandira had been going. But these
houses all had gates and driveways, and bearing in mind that she had only been
out of view for a minute or so, Nandira would not have had time to disappear
into one of these houses. Mma Ramotswe would have seen her in a driveway or
going in through a front door.

If she has gone into one of the houses,
thought Mma Ramotswe, then it must be one of the first two, as she would
certainly not have been able to reach the houses farther along the road. So
perhaps the situation was not as bad as she had thought it might be; all she
would have to do would be to check up on the first house on the right-hand side
of the road and the first house on the left.

She stood still for a
moment, and then she made up her mind. Walking as quickly as she could, she
made her way back to the tiny white van and drove back along the route on which
she had so recently followed Nandira. Then, parking the van in front of the
house on the right, she walked up the driveway towards the front door.

When she knocked on the door, a dog started to bark loudly inside the
house. Mma Ramotswe knocked again, and there came the sound of somebody
silencing the dog. “Quiet, Bison; quiet, I know, I know!” Then the
door opened and a woman looked out at her. Mma Ramotswe could tell that she was
not a Motswana. She was a West African, probably a Ghanaian, judging by the
complexion and the dress. Ghanaians were Mma Ramotswe’s favourite people;
they had a wonderful sense of humor and were almost inevitably in a good
mood.

“Hallo Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I’m
sorry to disturb you, but I’m looking for Sipho.”

The woman
frowned.

“Sipho? There’s no Sipho here.”

Mma
Ramotswe shook her head.

“I’m sure it was this house.
I’m one of the teachers from the secondary school, you see, and I need to
get a message to one of the form four boys. I thought that this was his
house.”

The woman smiled. “I’ve got two
daughters,” she said. “But no son. Could you find me a son, do you
think?”

“Oh dear,” said Mma Ramotswe, sounding
harassed. “Is it the house over the road then?”

The woman
shook her head. “That’s that Ugandan family,” she said.
“They’ve got a boy, but he’s only six or seven, I
think.”

Mma Ramotswe made her apologies and walked back down the
drive. She had lost Nandira on the very first afternoon, and she wondered
whether the girl had deliberately shrugged her off. Could she possibly have
known that she was being followed? This seemed most unlikely, which meant that
it was no more than bad luck that she had lost her. Tomorrow she would be more
careful. She would ignore Clovis Andersen for once and crowd her subject a
little more.

At eight o’clock that night she received a telephone
call from Mr Patel.

“You have anything to report to me
yet?” he asked. “Any information?”

Mma Ramotswe told
him that she unfortunately had not been able to find out where Nandira went
after school, but that she hoped that she might be more successful the
following day.

“Not very good,” said Mr Patel. “Not
very good. Well, I at least have something to report to you. She came home
three hours after school finished—three hours—and told me that she
had just been at a friend’s house. I said: what friend? and she just
answered that I did not know her. Her. Then my wife found a note on the table,
a note which our Nandira must have dropped. It said: “See you tomorrow,
Jack.” Now who is this Jack, then? Who is this person? Is that a
girl’s name, I ask you?”

“No,” said Mma
Ramotswe. “It sounds like a boy.”

“There!” said
Mr Patel, with the air of one producing the elusive answer to a problem.
“That is the boy, I think. That is the one we must find. Jack who? Where
does he live? That sort of thing—you must tell me it all.”

Mma Ramotswe prepared herself a cup of bush tea and went to bed early. It
had been an unsatisfactory day in more than one respect, and Mr Patel’s
crowing telephone call merely set the seal on it. So she lay in bed, the bush
tea on her bedside table, and read the newspaper before her eyelids began to
droop and she drifted off to sleep.

THE NEXT
afternoon she was late in reaching the school car park. She was beginning to
wonder whether she had lost Nandira again when she saw the girl come out of the
school, accompanied by another girl. Mma Ramotswe watched as the two of them
walked down the path and stood at the school gate. They seemed deep in
conversation with one another, in that exclusive way which teenagers have of
talking to their friends, and Mma Ramotswe was sure that if only she could hear
what was being said, then she would know the answers to more than one question.
Girls talked about their boyfriends in an easy, conspiratorial way, and she was
certain that this was the subject of conversation between Nandira and her
friend.

Suddenly a blue car drew up opposite the two girls. Mma
Ramotswe stiffened and watched as the driver leant over the passenger seat and
opened the front door. Nandira got in, and her friend got into the back. Mma
Ramotswe started the engine of the little white van and pulled out of the
school car park, just as the blue car drew away from the school. She followed
at a safe distance, but ready to close the gap between them if there was any
chance of losing them. She would not repeat yesterday’s mistake and see
Nandira vanish into thin air.

The blue car was taking its time, and Mma
Ramotswe did not have to strain to keep up. They drove past the Sun Hotel and
made their way towards the Stadium roundabout. There they turned in towards
town and drove past the hospital and the Anglican Cathedral towards the Mall.
Shops, thought Mma Ramotswe. They’re just going shopping; or are they?
She had seen teenagers meeting one another after school in places like the
Botswana Book Centre. They called it “hanging around,” she
believed. They stood about and chatted and cracked jokes and did everything
except buy something. Perhaps Nandira was going off to hang around with this
Jack.

The blue car nosed into a parking place near the President Hotel.
Mma Ramotswe parked several cars away and watched as the two girls got out of
the car, accompanied by an older woman, presumably the mother of the other
girl. She said something to her daughter, who nodded, and then detached herself
from the girls and walked off in the direction of the hardware stores.

Nandira and her friend walked past the steps of the President Hotel and
then slowly made their way up to the Post Office. Mma Ramotswe followed them
casually, stopping to look at a rack of African print blouses which a woman was
displaying in the square.

“Buy one of these Mma,” said the
woman. “Very good blouses. They never run. Look, this one I’m
wearing has been washed ten, twenty times, and hasn’t run.
Look.”

Mma Ramotswe looked at the woman’s blouse—the
colours had certainly not run. She glanced out of the corner of her eye at the
two girls. They were looking in the shoe shop window, taking their time about
wherever they were going.

“You wouldn’t have my
size,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I need a very big blouse.”

The trader checked her rack and then looked at Mma Ramotswe again.

“You’re right,” she said. “You are too big for
these blouses. Far too big.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled. “But they
are nice blouses, Mma, and I hope you sell them to some nice small
person.”

She moved on. The girls had finished with the shoe shop
and were strolling up towards the Book Centre. Mma Ramotswe had been right;
they were planning to hang about.

THERE WERE
very few people in the Botswana Book Centre. Three or four men were paging
through magazines in the periodical section, and one or two people were looking
at books. The assistants were leaning over the counters, gossiping idly, and
even the flies seemed lethargic.

Mma Ramotswe noticed that the two
girls were at the far end of the shop, looking at a shelf of books in the
Setswana section. What were they doing there? Nandira could be learning
Setswana at school, but she would hardly be likely to be buying any of the
schoolbooks or biblical commentaries that dominated that section. No, they must
be waiting for somebody.

Mma Ramotswe walked purposefully to the
African section and reached for a book. It was
The Snakes of Southern
Africa,
and it was well illustrated. She gazed at a picture of a short
brown snake and asked herself whether she had seen one of these. Her cousin had
been bitten by a snake like that years ago, when they were children, and had
come to no harm. Was that the snake? She looked at the text below the picture
and read. It could well have been the same snake, because it was described as
nonvenomous and not at all aggressive. But it had attacked her cousin; or had
her cousin attacked it? Boys attacked snakes. They threw stones at them and
seemed unable to leave them alone. But she was not sure whether Putoke had done
that; it was so long ago, and she could not really remember.

She looked
over at the girls. They were standing there, talking to one another again, and
one of them was laughing. Some story about boys, thought Mma Ramotswe. Well,
let them laugh; they’ll realise soon enough that the whole subject of men
was not very funny. In a few years’ time it would be tears, not laughter,
thought Mma Ramotswe grimly.

She returned to her perusal of
The
Snakes of Southern Africa.
Now this was a bad snake, this one. There it
was. Look at the head! Ow! And those evil eyes! Mma Ramotswe shuddered, and
read: “The above picture is of an adult male black mamba, measuring 1.87
metres. As is shown in the distribution map, this snake is to be found
throughout the region, although it has a certain preference for open veld. It
differs from the green mamba, both in distribution, habitat, and toxicity of
venom. The snake is one of the most dangerous snakes to be found in Africa,
being outranked in this respect only by the Gaboon Viper, a rare,
forest-dwelling snake found in certain parts of the eastern districts of
Zimbabwe.

“Accounts of attacks by black mambas are often
exaggerated, and stories of the snake’s attacking men on galloping
horses, and overtaking them, are almost certainly apocryphal. The mamba can
manage a considerable speed over a very short distance, but could not compete
with a horse. Nor are the stories of virtually instantaneous death necessarily
true, although the action of the venom can be speeded if the victim of the bite
should panic, which of course he often does on realising that he has been
bitten by a mamba.

“In one reliably recorded case, a
twenty-six-year-old man in good physical condition sustained a mamba bite on
his right ankle after he had inadvertently stepped on the snake in the bush.
There was no serum immediately available, but the victim possibly succeeded in
draining off some of the venom when he inflicted deep cuts on the site of the
bite (not a course of action which is today regarded as helpful). He then
walked some four miles through the bush to seek help and was admitted to
hospital within two hours. Antivenom was administered and the victim survived
unscathed; had it been a puff-adder bite, of course, there would have been
considerable necrotic damage within that time and he may even have lost the leg
…”

Mma Ramotswe paused. One leg. He would need to have an
artificial leg. Mr Patel. Nandira. She looked up sharply. The snake book had so
absorbed her that she had not been paying attention to the girls and
now—where were they?—gone. They were gone.