Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (25 page)

She stood up and stepped out from the shade.

“It is
hot,” she called out. “Can you give me a drink of
water?”

The window closed and a moment or two later the kitchen
door opened. Dr Komoti stood on the step wearing, she noticed, quite different
clothes from those he had on when he left Gaborone. He had a mug of water in
his hand, which he gave to her. Mma Ramotswe reached out and drank the water
gratefully. She was, in fact, thirsty, and the water was welcome, although she
noticed that the mug was dirty.

“What are you doing in our
garden?” said Dr Komoti, not unkindly. “Are you a
thief?”

Mma Ramotswe looked pained. “I am not,” she
said.

Dr Komoti looked at her coolly. “Well, then, if you are not
a thief, then what do you want? Are you looking for work? If so, we already
have a woman who comes to cook in this house. We do not need
anybody.”

Mma Ramotswe was about to utter her reply when somebody
appeared behind Dr Komoti and looked out over his shoulder. It was Dr
Komoti.

“What’s going on?” said the second Dr Komoti.
“What does this woman want?”

“I saw her in the
garden,” said the first Dr Komoti. “She tells me she isn’t a
thief.”

“And I certainly am not,” she said
indignantly. “I was looking at this house.”

The two men
looked puzzled.

“Why?” one of them asked. “Why would
you want to look at this house? There’s nothing special about it, and
it’s not for sale anyway.”

Mma Ramotswe tossed her head
back and laughed. “Oh, I’m not here to buy it,” she said.
“It’s just that I used to live here when I was a little girl. There
were Boers living in it then, a Mr van der Heever and his wife. My mother was
their cook, you see, and we lived in the servants’ quarters back there at
the end of the garden. My father kept the garden tidy …”

She broke off, and looked at the two men in reproach.

“It was
better in those days,” she said. “The garden was well looked
after.”

“Oh, I’m sure it was,” said one of the
two. “We’d like to get it under control one day. It’s just
that we’re busy men. We’re both doctors, you see, and we have to
spend all our time in the hospital.”

“Ah!” said Mma
Ramotswe, trying to sound reverential. “You are doctors here at the
hospital?”

“No,” said the first Dr Komoti. “I
have a surgery down near the railway station. My brother …”

“I work up that way,” said the other Dr Komoti, pointing
vaguely to the north. “Anyway, you can look at the garden as much as you
like, mother. You just go ahead. We can make you a mug of tea.”

“Ow!” said Mma Ramotswe. “You are very kind. Thank
you.”

IT WAS a relief to get away from
that garden, with its sinister undergrowth and its air of neglect. For a few
minutes, Mma Ramotswe pretended to inspect the trees and the shrubs—or
what could be seen of them—and then, thanking her hosts for the tea, she
walked off down the road. Her mind busily turned over the curious information
she had obtained. There were two Dr Komotis, which was nothing terribly unusual
in itself; yet somehow she felt that this was the essence of the whole matter.
There was no reason, of course, why there should not be twins who both went to
medical school—twins often led mirrored lives, and sometimes even went so
far as to marry the sister of the other’s wife. But there was something
particularly significant here, and Mma Ramotswe was sure that it was staring
her in the face, if only she could begin to see it.

She got into the
tiny white van and drove back down the road towards the centre of town. One Dr
Komoti had said that he had a surgery in town, near the railway station, and
she decided to take a look at this—not that a brass plate, if he had one,
would reveal a great deal.

She knew the railway station slightly. It
was a place that she enjoyed visiting, as it reminded her of the old Africa,
the days of uncomfortable companionship on crowded trains, of slow journeys
across great plains, of the sugarcane you used to eat to while away the time,
and of the pith of the cane you used to spit out of the wide windows. Here you
could still see it—or a part of it—here, where the trains that came
up from the Cape pulled slowly past the platform on their journey up through
Botswana to Bulawayo; here, where the Indian stores beside the railway
buildings still sold cheap blankets and men’s hats with a garish feather
tucked into the band.

Mma Ramotswe did not want Africa to change. She
did not want her people to become like everybody else, soulless, selfish,
forgetful of what it means to be an African, or, worse still, ashamed of
Africa. She would not be anything but an African, never, even if somebody came
up to her and said “Here is a pill, the very latest thing. Take it and it
will make you into an American.” She would say no. Never. No thank
you.

She stopped the white van outside the railway station and got out.
There were a lot of people about; women selling roasted maize cobs and sweet
drinks; men talking loudly to their friends; a family, travelling, with
cardboard suitcases and possessions bundled up in a blanket. A child pushing a
home-made toy car of twisted wire bumped into Mma Ramotswe and scurried off
without an apology, frightened of rebuke.

She approached one of the
woman traders and spoke to her in Setswana.

“Are you well today,
Mma?” she said politely.

“I am well, and you are well too,
Mma?”

“I am well, and I have slept very well.”

“Good.”

The greeting over, she said: “People tell
me that there is a doctor here who is very good. They call him Dr Komoti. Do
you know where his place is?”

The woman nodded. “There are
many people who go to that doctor. His place is over there, do you see, where
that white man has just parked his truck. That’s where he is.”

Mma Ramotswe thanked her informant and bought a cob of roasted maize. Then,
tackling the cob as she walked, she walked across the dusty square to the
rather dilapidated tinroofed building where Dr Komoti’s surgery was to be
found.

Rather to her surprise, the door was not locked, and when she
pushed it open she found a woman standing directly in front of her.

“I am sorry, the doctor isn’t here, Mma,” said the woman,
slightly testily. “I am the nurse. You can see the doctor on Monday
afternoon.”

“Ah!” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is a
sad thing to have to tidy up on a Friday evening, when everybody else is
thinking of going out.”

The nurse shrugged her shoulders.
“My boyfriend is taking me out later on. But I like to get everything
ready for Monday before the weekend starts. It is better that way.”

“Far better,” Mma Ramotswe answered, thinking quickly. “I
didn’t actually want to see the doctor, or not as a patient. I used to
work for him, you see, when he was up in Nairobi. I was a nurse on his ward. I
wanted just to say hallo.”

The nurse’s manner became
markedly more friendly.

“I’ll make you some tea,
Mma,” she offered. “It is still quite hot outside.”

Mma Ramotswe sat down and waited for the nurse to return with the pot of
tea.

“Do you know the other Dr Komoti?” she said.
“The brother?”

“Oh yes,” said the nurse.
“We see a lot of him. He comes in here to help, you see. Two or three
times a week.”

Mma Ramotswe lowered her cup, very slowly. Her
heart thumped within her; she realised that she was at the heart of the matter
now, the elusive solution within her grasp. But she would have to sound
casual.

“Oh, they did that up in Nairobi too,” she said,
waving her hand airily, as if these things were of little consequence.
“One helped the other. And usually the patients didn’t know that
they were seeing a different doctor.”

The nurse laughed.
“They do it here too,” she said. “I’m not sure if
it’s quite fair on the patients, but nobody has realised that there are
two of them. So everybody seems quite satisfied.”

Mma Ramotswe
picked up her cup again and passed it for refilling. “And what about
you?” she said. “Can you tell them apart?”

The nurse
handed the teacup back to Mma Ramotswe. “I can tell by one thing,”
she said. “One of them is quite good—the other’s hopeless.
The hopeless one knows hardly anything about medicine. If you ask me,
it’s a miracle that he got through medical school.”

Mma
Ramotswe thought, but did not say: He didn’t.

SHE STAYED in Mafikeng that night, at the
Station Hotel, which was noisy and uncomfortable, but she slept well
nonetheless, as she always did when she had just finished an enquiry. The next
morning she shopped at the OK Bazaars and found, to her delight, that there was
a rail of size 22 dresses on special offer. She bought three—two more
than she really needed—but if you were the owner of the No. 1
Ladies’ Detective Agency you had to keep up a certain style.

She
was home by three o’clock that afternoon and she telephoned Dr Maketsi at
his house and invited him to come immediately to her office to be informed of
the results of her enquiry. He arrived within ten minutes and sat opposite her
in the office, fiddling anxiously with the cuffs of his shirt.

“First of all,” announced Mma Ramotswe, “no
drugs.”

Dr Maketsi breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank
goodness for that,” he said. “That’s one thing I was really
worried about.”

“Well,” said Mma Ramotswe doubtfully.
“I’m not sure if you’re going to like what I’m going to
tell you.”

“He’s not qualified,” gasped Dr
Maketsi. “Is that it?”

“One of them is
qualified,” said Mma Ramotswe.

Dr Maketsi looked blank.
“One of them?”

Mma Ramotswe settled back in her chair with
the air of one about to reveal a mystery.

“There were once two
twins,” she began. “One went to medical school and became a doctor.
The other did not. The one with the qualification got a job as a doctor, but
was greedy and thought that two jobs as a doctor would pay better than one. So
he took two jobs, and did both of them part-time. When he wasn’t there,
his brother, who was his identical twin, you’ll recall, did the job for
him. He used such medical knowledge as he had picked up from his qualified
brother and no doubt also got advice from the brother as to what to do. And
that’s it. That’s the story of Dr Komoti, and his twin brother in
Mafikeng.”

Dr Maketsi sat absolutely silent. As Mma Ramotswe
spoke he had sunk his head in his hands and for a moment she thought that he
was going to cry.

“So we’ve had both of them in the
hospital,” he said at last. “Sometimes we’ve had the
qualified one, and sometimes we’ve had the twin brother.”

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe simply. “For three days a week,
say, you’ve had the qualified twin while the unqualified twin practised
as a general practitioner in a surgery near Mafikeng Railway Station. Then
they’d change about, and I assume that the qualified one would pick up
any pieces which the unqualified one had left lying around, so to
speak.”

“Two jobs for the price of one medical
degree,” mused Dr Maketsi. “It’s the most cunning scheme
I’ve come across for a long, long time.”

“I have to
admit I was amazed by it,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I thought that
I’d seen all the varieties of human dishonesty, but obviously one can
still be surprised from time to time.”

Dr Maketsi rubbed his
chin.

“I’ll have to go to the police about this,” he
said. “There’s going to have to be a prosecution. We have to
protect the public from people like this.”

“Unless
…” started Mma Ramotswe.

Dr Maketsi grabbed at the straw
he suspected she might be offering him.

“Can you think of an
alternative?” he asked. “Once this gets out, people will take
fright. We’ll have people encouraging others not to go to hospital. Our
public health programmes rely on trust—you know how it is.”

“Precisely,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I suggest that we
transfer the heat elsewhere. I agree with you: the public has to be protected
and Dr Komoti is going to have to be struck off, or whatever you people do. But
why not get this done in somebody else’s patch?”

“Do
you mean in Mafikeng?”

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe.
“After all, an offence is being committed down there and we can let the
South Africans deal with it. The papers up here in Gaborone probably
won’t even pick up on it. All that people here will know is that Dr
Komoti resigned suddenly, which people often do—for all sorts of
reasons.”

“Well,” said Dr Maketsi. “I would
rather like to keep the Minister’s nose out of all this. I don’t
think it would help if he became … how shall we put it,
upset?”

“Of course it wouldn’t help,” said Mma
Ramotswe. “With your permission I shall telephone my friend Billy Pilani,
who’s a police captain down there. He’d love to be seen to expose a
bogus doctor. Billy likes a good, sensational arrest.”

“You
do that,” said Dr Maketsi, smiling. This was a tidy solution to a most
extraordinary matter, and he was most impressed with the way in which Mma
Ramotswe had handled it.

“You know,” he said, “I
don’t think that even my aunt in Mochudi could have dealt with this any
better than you have.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled at her old friend. You
can go through life and make new friends every year—every month
practically—but there was never any substitute for those friendships of
childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are
bound to one another with hoops of steel.

She reached out and touched
Dr Maketsi on the arm, gently, as old friends will sometimes do when they have
nothing more to say.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE