Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (18 page)

“Exactly,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “Oh
dear.”

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

THE CUTTING OF FINGERS
AND SNAKES

I
N
THE beginning, which in Gaborone really means thirty years ago, there were very
few factories. In fact, when Princess Marina watched as the Union Jack was
hauled down in the stadium on that windy night in 1966 and the Bechuanaland
Protectorate ceased to exist, there were none. Mma Ramotswe had been an
eight-year-old girl then, a pupil at the Government School at Mochudi, and only
vaguely aware that anything special was happening and that something which
people called freedom had arrived. But she had not felt any different the next
day, and she wondered what this freedom meant. Now she knew of course, and her
heart filled with pride when she thought of all they had achieved in thirty
short years. The great swathe of territory which the British really had not
known what to do with had prospered to become the best-run state in Africa, by
far. Well could people shout Pula! Pula! Rain! Rain! with pride.

Gaborone had grown, changing out of all recognition. When she first went
there as a little girl there had been little more than several rings of houses
about the Mall and the few government offices—much bigger than Mochudi,
of course, and so much more impressive, with the government buildings and
Seretse Khama’s house. But it was still quite small, really, if you had
seen photographs of Johannesburg, or even Bulawayo. And no factories. None at
all.

Then, little by little, things had changed. Somebody built a
furniture workshop which produced sturdy living-room chairs. Then somebody else
decided to set up a small factory to make breeze-blocks for building houses.
Others followed, and soon there was a block of land on the Lobatse Road which
people began to call the Industrial Sites. This caused a great stir of pride;
so this is what freedom brought, people thought. There was the Legislative
Assembly and the House of Chiefs, of course, where people could say what they
liked—and did—but there were also these little factories and the
jobs that went with them. Now there was even a truck factory on the Francistown
Road, assembling ten trucks a month to send up as far as the Congo; and all of
this started from nothing!

Mma Ramotswe knew one or two factory
managers, and one factory owner. The factory owner, a Motswana who had come
into the country from South Africa to enjoy the freedom denied him on the other
side, had set up his bolt works with a tiny amount of capital, a few scraps of
secondhand machinery bought from a bankruptcy sale in Bulawayo, and a workforce
consisting of his brother-in-law, himself, and a mentally handicapped boy whom
he had found sitting under a tree and who had proved to be quite capable of
sorting bolts. The business had prospered, largely because the idea behind it
was so simple. All that the factory made was a single sort of bolt, of the sort
which was needed for fixing galvanised tin roof sheeting onto roof beams. This
was a simple process, which required only one sort of machine—a machine
of a sort that never seemed to break down and rarely needed servicing.

Hector Lepodise’s factory grew rapidly, and by the time Mma Ramotswe
got to know him, he was employing thirty people and producing bolts that held
roofs onto their beams as far north as Malawi. At first all his employees had
been his relatives, with the exception of the mentally handicapped boy, who had
subsequently been promoted to tea-boy. As the business grew, however, the
supply of relatives dwindled, and Hector began to employ strangers. He
maintained his earlier paternalistic employment habits, though—there was
always plenty of time off for funerals as well as full pay for those who were
genuinely sick—and his workers, as a result, were usually fiercely loyal
to him. Yet with a staff of thirty, of whom only twelve were relatives, it was
inevitable that there would be some who would attempt to exploit his kindness,
and this is where Mma Ramotswe came in.

“I can’t put my
finger on it,” said Hector, as he drank coffee with Mma Ramotswe on the
verandah of the President Hotel, “but I’ve never trusted that man.
He only came to me about six months ago, and now this.”

“Where had he been working before?” asked Mma Ramotswe.
“What did they say about him?”

Hector shrugged. “He
had a reference from a factory over the border. I wrote to them but they
didn’t bother to reply. Some of them don’t take us seriously, you
know. They treat us as one of their wretched Bantustans. You know what
they’re like.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. She did. They were not
all bad, of course. But many of them were awful, which somehow eclipsed the
better qualities of some of the nice ones. It was very sad.

“So
he came to me just six months ago,” Hector continued. “He was quite
good at working the machinery, and so I put him on the new machine I bought
from that Dutchman. He worked it well, and I upped his pay by fifty pula a
month. Then suddenly he left me, and that was that.”

“Any
reason?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

Hector frowned. “None that I
could make out. He collected his pay on a Friday and just did not come back.
That was about two months ago. Then the next I heard from him was through an
attorney in Mahalapye. He wrote me a letter saying that his client, Mr Solomon
Moretsi, was starting a legal action against me for four thousand pula for the
loss of a finger owing to an industrial accident in my factory.”

Mma Ramotswe poured another cup of coffee for them both while she digested
this development. “And was there an accident?”

“We
have an incident book in the works,” said Hector. “If anybody gets
hurt, they have to enter the details in the book. I looked at the date which
the attorney mentioned and I saw that there had been something. Moretsi had
entered that he had hurt a finger on his right hand. He wrote that he had put a
bandage on it and it seemed all right. I asked around, and somebody said that
he had mentioned to them that he was leaving his machine for a while to fix his
finger which he had cut. They thought it had not been a big cut, and nobody had
bothered any more about it.”

“Then he left?”

“Yes,” said Hector. “That was a few days before he
left.”

Mma Ramotswe looked at her friend. He was an honest man,
she knew, and a good employer. If anybody had been hurt she was sure that he
would have done his best for them.

Hector took a sip of his coffee.
“I don’t trust that man,” he said. “I don’t think
I ever did. I simply don’t believe that he lost a finger in my factory.
He may have lost a finger somewhere else, but that has nothing to do with
me.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled. “You want me to find this finger
for you? Is that why you asked me to the President Hotel?”

Hector
laughed. “Yes. And I also asked you because I enjoy sitting here with you
and I would like to ask you to marry me. But I know that the answer will always
be the same.”

Mma Ramotswe reached out and patted her friend on
the arm.

“Marriage is all very well,” she said. “But
being the No. 1 lady detective in the country is not an easy life. I
couldn’t sit at home and cook—you know that.”

Hector
shook his head. “I’ve always promised you a cook. Two cooks, if you
like. You could still be a detective.”

Mma Ramotswe shook her
head. “No,” she said. “You can carry on asking me, Hector
Lepodise, but I’m afraid that the answer is still no. I like you as a
friend, but I do not want a husband. I am finished with husbands for
good.”

MMA RAMOTSWE examined the
papers in the office of Hector’s factory. It was a hot and uncomfortable
room, unprotected from the noise of the factory, and with barely enough space
for the two filing cabinets and two desks which furnished it. Papers lay
scattered on the surface of each desk; receipts, bills, technical
catalogues.

“If only I had a wife,” said Hector.
“Then this office would not be such a mess. There would be places to sit
down and flowers in a vase on my desk. A woman would make all the
difference.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled at his remark, but said nothing.
She picked up the grubby exercise book which he had placed in front of her and
paged through it. This was the incident book, and there, sure enough, was the
entry detailing Moretsi’s injury, the words spelled out in capitals in a
barely literate hand:

MORETSI CUT HIS FINGER
.
NO
. 2
FINGER COUNTING FROM THUMB
.
MACHINE DID
IT
.
RIGHT HAND
.
BANDAGE PUT ON BY
SAME
.
SIGNED
:
SOLOMON MORETSI
.
WITNESS
:
JESUS CHRIST
.

She reread the entry and
then looked at the attorney’s letter. The dates tallied: “My client
says that the accident occurred on 10th May last. He attended at the Princess
Marina Hospital the following day. The wound was dressed, but osteomyelitis set
in. The following week surgery was performed and the damaged finger was
amputated at the proximal phalangeal joint (see attached hospital report). My
client claims that this accident was due entirely to your negligence in failing
adequately to fence working parts of machinery operated in your factory and has
instructed me to raise an action for damages on his behalf. It would clearly be
in the interests of all concerned if this action were to be settled promptly
and my client has accordingly been advised that the sum of four thousand pula
will be acceptable to him in lieu of court-awarded damages.”

Mma
Ramotswe read the remainder of the letter, which as far as she could make out
was meaningless jargon which the attorney had been taught at law school. They
were impossible, these people; they had a few years of lectures at the
University of Botswana and they set themselves up as experts on everything.
What did they know of life? All they knew was how to parrot the stock phrases
of their profession and to continue to be obstinate until somebody, somewhere,
paid up. They won by attrition in most cases, but they themselves concluded it
was skill. Few of them would survive in her profession, which required tact and
perspicacity.

She looked at the copy of the medical report. It was
brief and said exactly what the attorney had paraphrased. The date was right;
the headed note paper looked authentic; and there was the doctor’s
signature at the bottom. It was a name she knew.

Mma Ramotswe looked up
from the papers to see Hector staring at her expectantly.

“It
seems straightforward,” she said. “He cut his finger and it became
infected. What do your insurance people say?”

Hector sighed.
“They say I should pay up. They say that they’ll cover me for it
and it would be cheaper in the long run. Once one starts paying lawyers to
defend it, then the costs can very quickly overtake the damages. Apparently
they’ll settle up to ten thousand pula without fighting, although they
asked me not to tell anybody about that. They would not like people to think
they’re an easy touch.”

“Shouldn’t you do what
they say?” asked Mma Ramotswe. It seemed to her that there was no real
point in denying that the accident had happened. Obviously this man had lost a
finger and deserved some compensation; why should Hector make such a fuss about
this when he did not even have to pay?

Hector guessed what she was
thinking. “I won’t,” he said. “I just refuse. Refuse.
Why should I pay money to somebody who I think is trying to cheat me? If I pay
him this time, then he’ll go on to somebody else. I’d rather give
that four thousand pula to somebody who deserved it.”

He pointed
to the door that linked the office to the factory floor.

“I’ve got a woman in there,” he said, “with ten
children. Yes, ten. She’s a good worker too. Think what she could do with
four thousand pula.”

“But she hasn’t lost a
finger,” interrupted Mma Ramotswe. “He might need that money if he
can’t work so well anymore.”

“Bah! Bah! He’s a
crook, that man. I couldn’t sack him because I had nothing on him. But I
knew he was no good. And some of the others didn’t like him either. The
boy who makes the tea, the one with a hole in his brain, he can always tell. He
wouldn’t take tea to him. He said that the man was a dog and
couldn’t drink tea. You see, he knew. These people sense these
things.”

“But there’s a big difference between
entertaining suspicions and being able to prove something,” said Mma
Ramotswe. “You couldn’t stand up in the High Court in Lobatse and
say that there was something about this man which was not quite right. The
judge would just laugh at you. That’s what judges do when people say that
sort of thing. They just laugh.”

Hector was silent.

“Just settle,” said Mma Ramotswe quietly. “Do what the
insurance people tell you to do. Otherwise you’ll end up with a bill for
far more than four thousand pula.”