Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (24 page)

Nothing happened
that evening, nor the next evening. Mma Ramotswe was beginning to wonder
whether there was ever any variety to the routine of Dr Komoti’s life
when suddenly things changed. It was a Friday afternoon, and Mma Ramotswe was
ready to follow Dr Komoti back from work. The doctor was slightly late in
leaving the hospital, but eventually he came out of the casualty entrance, a
stethoscope tucked into the pocket of his white coat, and climbed into his
car.

Mma Ramotswe followed him out of the hospital grounds, satisfied
that he was not aware of her presence. She suspected that he might go to the
Book Centre for his newspaper, but this time instead of turning into town, he
turned the other way. Mma Ramotswe was pleased that something at last might be
happening, and she concentrated carefully on not losing him as they made their
way through the traffic. The roads were busier than usual, as it was a Friday
afternoon at the end of the month, and this meant payday. That evening there
would be more road accidents than normal, and whoever was taking Dr
Komoti’s place in casualty would be kept more than occupied stitching up
the drunks and picking the shattered windscreen glass out of the road accident
cases.

Mma Ramotswe was surprised to find that Dr Komoti was heading
for the Lobatse Road. This was interesting. If he was dealing in drugs, then to
use Lobatse as a base would be a good idea. It was close enough to the border,
and he might be passing things into South Africa, or picking things up there.
Whatever it was, it made him a much more interesting man to follow.

They drove down, the tiny white van straining to keep Dr Komoti’s
more powerful car in sight. Mma Ramotswe was not worried about being spotted;
the road was busy and there was no reason why Dr Komoti should single out the
tiny white van. Once they got to Lobatse of course, she would have to be more
circumspect, as he could notice her in the thinner traffic there.

When
they did not stop in Lobatse, Mma Ramotswe began to worry. If he was going to
drive straight through Lobatse it was possible that he was visiting some
village on the other side of the town. But this was rather unlikely, as there
was not much on the other side of Lobatse—or not much to interest
somebody like Dr Komoti. The only other thing, then, was the border, some miles
down the road. Yes! Dr Komoti was going over the border, she was sure of it. He
was going to Mafikeng.

As the realisation dawned that Dr Komoti’s
destination was out of the country, Mma Ramotswe felt an intense irritation
with her own stupidity. She did not have her passport with her; Dr Komoti would
go through, and she would have to remain in Botswana. And once he was on the
other side, then he could do whatever he liked—and no doubt
would—and she would know nothing about it.

She watched him stop
at the border post, and then she turned back, like a hunter who has chased his
prey to the end of his preserve and must now give up. He would be away for the
weekend now, and she knew as little about what he did with his time as she did
about the future. Next week, she would have to get back to the tedious task of
watching his house by night, in the frustrating knowledge that the real
mischief had taken place over the weekend. And while she was doing all this,
she would have to postpone other cases—cases which carried fees and paid
garage bills.

When she arrived back in Gaborone, Mma Ramotswe was in a
thoroughly bad mood. She had an early night, but the bad mood was still with
her the following morning when she went into the Mall. As she often did on a
Saturday morning, she had a cup of coffee on the verandah of the President
Hotel and enjoyed a chat with her friend Grace Gakatsla. Grace, who had a dress
shop in Broadhurst, always cheered her up with her stories of the vagaries of
her customers. One, a Government Minister’s wife, had recently bought a
dress on a Friday and brought it back the following Monday, saying that it did
not really fit. Yet Grace had been at the wedding on Saturday where the dress
had been worn, and it had looked perfect.

“Of course I
couldn’t tell her to her face she was a liar and that I wasn’t a
dress-hire shop,” said Grace. “So I asked her if she had enjoyed
the wedding. She smiled and said that she had. So I said I enjoyed it too. She
obviously hadn’t seen me there. She stopped smiling and she said that
maybe she’d give the dress another chance.”

“She’s just a porcupine, that woman,” said Mma Ramotswe.
“A hyena,” said Grace. “An anteater, with her long
nose.”

The laughter had died away, and Grace had gone off,
allowing Mma Ramotswe’s bad mood to settle back in place. It seemed to
her that she might continue to feel like this for the rest of the weekend; in
fact, she was worried that it could last until the Komoti case was
finished—if she ever finished it.

Mma Ramotswe paid her bill and
left, and it was then, as she was walking down the front steps of the hotel,
that she saw Dr Komoti in the Mall.

FOR A
moment Mma Ramotswe stood quite still. Dr Komoti had crossed the border last
night just before seven in the evening. The border closed at eight, which meant
that he could not possibly have had time to get down to Mafikeng, which was a
further forty minutes’ drive, and back in time to cross again before the
border closed. So he had only spent one evening there and had come back first
thing that morning.

She recovered from her surprise at seeing him and
realised that she should make good use of the opportunity to follow him and see
what he did. He was now in the hardware store, and Mma Ramotswe lingered
outside, looking idly at the contents of the window until he came out again.
Then he walked purposefully back to the car park and she watched him getting
into his car.

Dr Komoti stayed in for the rest of the day. At six in
the evening he went off to the Sun Hotel where he had a drink with two other
men, whom Mma Ramotswe recognised as fellow Nigerians. She knew that one of
them worked for a firm of accountants, and the other, she believed, was a
primary school-teacher somewhere. There was nothing about their meeting which
seemed suspicious; there would be many such groups of people meeting right at
this moment throughout the town—people thrown together in the artificial
closeness of the expatriate life, talking about home.

He stayed an hour
and then left, and that was the extent of Dr Komoti’s social life for the
weekend. By Sunday evening, Mma Ramotswe had decided that she would report to
Dr Maketsi the following week and tell him that there was unfortunately no
evidence of his moving in drug-abusing circles and that he seemed, by contrast,
to be the model of sobriety and respectability. There was not even a sign of
women, unless they were hiding in the house and never came out. Nobody had
arrived at the house while she was watching, and nobody had left, apart from Dr
Komoti himself. He was, quite simply, rather a boring man to watch.

But
there was still the question of Mafikeng and the Friday evening dash there and
back. If he had been going shopping down there in the OK Bazaars—as many
people did—then he would surely have stayed for at least part of Saturday
morning, which he clearly did not. He must have done, then, whatever it was he
wanted to do on Friday evening. Was there a woman down there—one of those
flashy South African women whom men, so unaccountably, seemed to like? That
would be the simple explanation, and the most likely one too. But why the hurry
back on Saturday morning? Why not stay for Saturday and take her to lunch at
the Mmbabatho Hotel? There was something which did not seem quite right, and
Mma Ramotswe thought that she might follow him down to Mafikeng next weekend,
if he went, and see what happened. If there was nothing to be seen, then she
could do some shopping and return on Saturday afternoon. She had been meaning
to make the trip anyway, and she might as well kill two birds with one
stone.

DR KOMOTI proved obliging. The
following Friday he left the hospital on time and drove off in the direction of
Lobatse, followed at a distance by Mma Ramotswe in her van. Crossing the border
proved tricky, as Mma Ramotswe had to make sure that she did not get too close
to him at the border post, and that at the same time she did not lose him on
the other side. For a few moments it looked as if she would be delayed, as a
ponderous official paged closely through her passport, looking at the stamps
which reflected her coming and going to Johannesburg and Mafikeng.

“It says here, under occupation, that you are a detective,” he
said in a surly tone. “How can a woman be a detective?”

Mma
Ramotswe glared at him. If she prolonged the encounter, she could lose Dr
Komoti, whose passport was now being stamped. In a few minutes he would be
through the border controls, and the tiny white van would have no chance of
catching up with him.

“Many women are detectives,” said Mma
Ramotswe, with dignity. “Have you not read Agatha Christie?”

The clerk looked up at her and bristled.

“Are you saying I am
not an educated man?” he growled. “Is that what you are saying?
That I have not read this Mr Christie?”

“I am not,”
said Mma Ramotswe. “You people are well educated, and efficient. Only
yesterday, when I was in your Minister’s house, I said to him that I
thought his immigration people were very polite and efficient. We had a good
talk about it over supper.”

The official froze. For a moment he
looked uncertain, but then he reached for his rubber stamp and stamped the
passport.

“Thank you, Mma,” he said. “You may go
now.”

Mma Ramotswe did not like lying, but sometimes it was
necessary, particularly when faced with people who were promoted beyond their
talents. An embroidering of the truth like that—she knew the Minister,
even if only very distantly—sometimes gingered people up a bit, and it
was often for their own good. Perhaps that particular official would think
twice before he again decided to bully a woman for no good reason.

She
climbed back into the van and was waved past the barrier. There was now no
sight of Dr Komoti and she had to push the van to its utmost before she caught
up with him. He was not going particularly fast, and so she dropped back
slightly and followed him past the remnants of Mangope’s capital and its
fantouche Republic of Bophuthatswana. There was the stadium in which the
president had been held by his own troops when they revolted; there were the
government offices that administered the absurdly fragmented state on behalf of
its masters in Pretoria. It was all such a waste, she thought, such an utter
folly, and when the time had come it had just faded away like the illusion that
it had always been. It was all part of the farce of apartheid and the monstrous
dream of Verwoerd; such pain, such long-drawn-out suffering—to be added
by history to all the pain of Africa.

Dr Komoti suddenly turned right.
They had reached the outskirts of Mafikeng, in a suburb of neat, well-laid-out
streets and houses with large, well-fenced gardens. It was into the driveway of
one of these houses that he turned, requiring Mma Ramotswe to drive past to
avoid causing suspicion. She counted the number of houses she passed,
though—seven—and then parked the van under a tree.

There
was what used to be called a sanitary lane which ran down the back of the
houses. Mma Ramotswe left the van and walked to the end of the sanitary lane.
The house that Dr Komoti entered would be eight houses up—seven, and the
one she had had to walk past to get to the entrance to the lane.

She
stood in the sanitary lane at the back of the eighth house and peered through
the garden. Somebody had once cared for it, but that must have been years ago.
Now it was a tangle of vegetation—mulberry trees, uncontrolled
bougainvillaea bushes that had grown to giant proportions and sent great sprigs
of purple flowers skywards, paw-paw trees with rotting fruit on the stems. It
would be a paradise for snakes, she thought; there could be mambas lurking in
the uncut grass and boomslangs draped over the branches of the trees, all of
them lying in wait for somebody like her to be foolish enough to enter.

She pushed the gate open gingerly. It had clearly not been used for a long
time, and the hinge squeaked badly. But this did not really matter, as little
sound would penetrate the vegetation that shielded the back fence from the
house, about a hundred yards away. In fact, it was virtually impossible to see
the house through the greenery, which made Mma Ramotswe feel safe, from the
eyes of those within the house at least, if not from snakes.

Mma
Ramotswe moved forward gingerly, placing each foot carefully and expecting at
any moment to hear a hiss from a protesting snake. But nothing moved, and she
was soon crouching under a mulberry tree as close as she dared to get to the
house. From the shade of the tree she had a good view of the back door and the
open kitchen window; yet she could not see into the house itself, as it was of
the old colonial style, with wide eaves, which made the interior cool and dark.
It was far easier to spy on people who live in modern houses, because
architects today had forgotten about the sun and put people in goldfish bowls
where the whole world could peer in through large unprotected windows, should
they so desire.

Now what should she do? She could stay where she was in
the hope that somebody came out of the back door, but why should they bother to
do that? And if they did, then what would she do?

Suddenly a window at
the back of the house opened and a man leaned out. It was Dr Komoti.

“You! You over there! Yes, you, fat lady! What are you doing sitting
under our mulberry tree?”

Mma Ramotswe experienced a sudden,
absurd urge to look over her shoulder, as if to imply that there was somebody
else under the tree. She felt like a schoolgirl caught stealing fruit, or doing
some other forbidden act. There was nothing one could say; one just had to own
up.