The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection: No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (13) (13 page)

“I am not sure about these things, Rra,” she said quietly. “But I think that they are watching over us somehow—the people who have gone before.” She fixed him with a gaze; the poor man in his sorrow. “Your late wife will know that you still love her, Rra. She will know that.”

M
MA RAMOTSWE
had planned to spend the following day carrying out a number of minor tasks that for one reason or another she had been putting off. There were bills to be paid—a painful process for both her and Mma Makutsi, who had a special expression she adopted as she folded the cheques and placed them in their envelopes. “You have your bill-paying face on,” Mma Ramotswe remarked. “It is as if you were swallowing some bitter medicine, Mma. Or eating an aloe, maybe.”

Mma Makutsi acknowledged that she found the whole business of paying bills a difficult one. “There are just too many bills,” she complained. “If there were only one or two, then I could pay them without looking as if I had vinegar on my tongue. But look at them, Mma … electricity bills, the book-keeper’s bill, the stationery bill, the water bill … How much water do we use here, Mma? How can they charge us this much when all we do is take a little bit of water to make tea? And a little bit of water for the bathroom? That is all. But they charge us as if we’re the Victoria Falls. Look at that bill! Just look at it.”

“Water is very precious,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is not cheap.”

Mma Makutsi was unimpressed. “And soon there will be a bill for air,” said Mma Makutsi. “They will be saying: you have used so much of the Government’s oxygen this month—please pay us. Terms: thirty days net.”

Mma Ramotswe laughed. “I do not think so, Mma—”

Mma Makutsi, sticking down an envelope flap with perhaps slightly more force than was strictly necessary, cut her short. “And who says the air belongs to the Government, anyway?”

“I don’t think the Government says that, Mma.”

“Oh, don’t they? I think they do, Mma. If they didn’t say that the air belongs to them, then why do they say that you need their permission to fly through it? Phuti knows a pilot, and he told him that he has to speak on the radio to some government people called Air Traffic Control and ask their permission to fly through the air above Gaborone. That means that they think they own it—as if it’s their own yard, or something like that.”

Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “They do not say they own the air, Mma. All that those people are doing is making sure that planes don’t fly into one another. If you’ve got one plane going this way and another plane flying from the other direction and they meet, then that would not be very good, would it?”

Mma Makutsi hesitated for a moment; but no, she was not convinced. “They are just interfering,” she said. “The pilots can see exactly where they’re going. They’re not asleep.”

“It happens very quickly,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And there are clouds, Mma. You cannot see what is happening in a cloud.”

“Then you shouldn’t fly through them,” snapped Mma Makutsi. “You see a cloud and you go round it. That is all you need to do. Phuti says that it’s not a good thing to fly through clouds. You can get struck by lightning and then that will be the end.”

Mma Ramotswe was silent. She had great admiration for Mma Makutsi, but not when she was in one of these contrary moods. When that happened, she would dig in over some matter and become quite unreasonable, even if it was plain that she was arguing a lost cause. There were so many examples of her doing this, and Mma Ramotswe had learned that the best response was to change the subject.

“Lightning is very dangerous,” she said. “Not just in the air. That poor man in Molepolole—did you read about him, Mma? He was struck by lightning when he was walking home across a field. He is late now.”

“It was very sad,” said Mma Makutsi. “I read that the lightning hit his hat. Perhaps he should have had a lightning conductor on the top of it, with a wire going down his back to the earth. Do you think that would work, Mma?”

“I do not think so, Mma Makutsi,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is safer to stay indoors.”

“Oh no, it isn’t,” came the quick rebuttal. “One of the men who worked for Phuti—one of the men who loaded furniture—he fell over in his own house and broke his leg. They took him to hospital, but that stuff you have in the middle of your bones …”

“Bone marrow.”

“Yes, that stuff. It leaked into his blood and blocked one of his pipes …”

“Blood vessels.”

Mma Makutsi shook her head solemnly. “Exactly. It blocked it up and now he is late too.”

There was a silence. Mma Ramotswe looked at the clock. She had things to do outside the office, and she thought that it was a good time, perhaps, to get out and about and leave Mma Makutsi to attend to the office tasks. By the time she got back, Mma Makutsi might be in a less difficult mood.

“I have to go and see Mma Potokwane,” Mma Ramotswe announced, rising from her chair. “This business with Mr. Ditso. I must get some more details from her.”

“That one’s not going to end well,” said Mma Makutsi. “We’ll never find out anything about that man, Mma. He’s far too clever for us …” She looked across the room at Mma Ramotswe. “I’ll tell you something, Mma. You know how they say
money talks
? Well, I say the opposite is true:
money doesn’t talk
. And I say that because money never tells you where it has come from. Never. So if Mma Potokwane thinks that she will find out that this rich man of hers has got his money from some bad place, she is going to be very disappointed. Money has no mouth, Mma. It cannot speak.”

Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “Don’t give up before we’ve started, Mma.” She paused. “And remember: we have a secret weapon.”

Mma Makutsi frowned. “And what would that be, Mma?”

Mma Ramotswe waited for a few moments before she answered. “Clovis Andersen,” she said simply.

The large round glasses caught the light; flashed. The contrariness evaporated—at least to an extent. Yes. Clovis Andersen. Oh yes!

SHE DROVE OUT
to Tlokweng along one of the back roads—a roundabout way that gave her time to get over the tension that Mma Makutsi’s odd mood had injected into the day. Driving, she found, always helped her to unwind, and as she made her way slowly along the winding dirt road she found herself smiling again. The one thing you could not say about Mma Makutsi was that she was dull; far from it—Mma Makutsi was what her friend Mma Moffat would have described as
a character
. And it was better to be a character, she felt, than to be one of those people who spoke
about nothing at all, and probably thought about nothing too; such people were soporific and could be marketed by some enterprising person as
walking sleeping pills
. Yes, that was a good idea: if you had difficulty sleeping you could phone up one of these people and, for a small charge, they would come to your house and sit and look at you, and you would gradually nod off to sleep. You would have to pay them first, though, as otherwise they would have to wake you up to collect their fee, and that would defeat the purpose of calling them in the first place … And there could be another service for people who felt sleepy but for some reason needed to keep awake. They could phone for Mma Makutsi, and she would come and talk about this and that and make the sort of remarks that would keep people on their toes, puzzling over what she meant, or getting irritated and hot under the collar because they disagreed with what she was saying. Makutsi Wake-up Services would be a good name for such a concern. There were so many possible businesses …

She turned a corner, and there was another small business, set back from the road—one she had not seen before. The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon. She slowed down. The premises was a tin shed—not much more than a shack—topped with a freshly painted notice announcing the name of the concern and laying claim to national pre-eminence in the field.
Famous throughout Botswana
, the notice claimed.
First consultation free. No appointment necessary
.

She stopped on impulse. Mma Ramotswe did not patronise beauty salons, although she knew many who did, including, she suspected, Mma Makutsi. There was something about this salon that intrigued her, though, and she had time on her hands. Mma Potokwane was not expecting her, and so it did not matter when she arrived at the orphan farm. If the initial consultation was free, then it would be interesting to see what they suggested. And there
was another reason for stopping: as a private detective, Mma Ramotswe was acutely aware of the importance of contacts, who might provide information at some point in the future. The people who ran beauty salons were known to be repositories of gossip, and the owner of the Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon would probably be no exception to that general rule. There would be no harm, she thought, in making a new acquaintance who was so placed.

As she parked the van, she became aware of a face and then a pair of eyes peering out at her from the dark interior of the building. She stepped out of the van and closed the door behind her, which was the signal for the face and eyes to emerge too; now she saw a woman in a blue dress, rather like a nurse’s tunic, standing in the doorway watching her. The woman greeted her as she approached.

“
Dumela
, Mma.” An outstretched hand.

The greetings over, the woman gave her name. “I am Mma Soleti. I am the owner here.”

Mma Ramotswe inclined her head. “I am Precious Ramotswe.” There was a moment’s hesitation; it did not always help to say that one was a detective, but honesty, she felt, required it. “I have a small business, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.”

Mma Soleti smiled, exposing strikingly white teeth. “I know that place. I sometimes drive past it. There is a garage too.”

“That is Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. The mechanic is my husband.”

Mma Soleti nodded. “I hear he is very good.”

Mma Ramotswe beamed with pleasure. She never tired of hearing compliments paid to her husband. “I am very lucky to be married to such a man,” she said. “He is kind.”

“That is very good, Mma.”

A brief silence ensued before Mma Ramotswe spoke again. “A consultation … I was wondering …”

Mma Soleti clapped her hands together. “And I was hoping!
I said to myself, ‘This is a lady who will do very well with a bit of guidance and adjustment.’ You have made a very good decision, Mma.”

Mma Ramotswe drew back involuntarily. “Just an initial consultation, Mma. I don’t know if I want to do too much. I am traditionally built, you see, and I am not normally one who bothers too much about these matters of fashion.”

Mma Soleti considered this for a moment, turning her head slightly as if to assess Mma Ramotswe from a different angle. “Really, Mma? But being traditionally built is a positive advantage, in my view. You see, if a lady is one of these modern …”

“Stick insects,” Mma Ramotswe supplied.

Mma Soleti burst out laughing. “Yes, that is what they are, Mma. Stick insects. It’s very difficult to do much with those ladies because … well, there’s so little of them. But with a traditionally built lady like yourself, it’s like painting a big wall—there’s much more room for the artist.” She paused. “And I do think of myself as an artist, Mma.”

Mma Ramotswe found herself warming to this woman. Following her into the tin building, she saw that there was a plastic-covered couch, rather like those used by doctors to examine their patients, a desk, and a glass-fronted cupboard full of bottles and jars. Mma Soleti gestured for her to sit on the edge of the couch. “There is no need to lie down, Mma. Not at this stage. I shall be mostly concerned with the face in this consultation. We can deal with the rest of you some other time.”

Mma Ramotswe perched on the edge of the couch. It was of such a height that her feet barely touched the ground, and one of her shoes, her flat walking shoes that were such a contrast to Mma Makutsi’s more fashionable footwear, began to slip off. Mma Soleti paid no attention to this. She had picked up a large magnifying glass and had begun to peer closely at her new client’s face. It was a
disconcerting experience; the beautician’s eyes, viewed from the other side of the glass, were large, like the eyes of a fish, Mma Ramotswe thought.

“Mmm,” said Mma Soleti, adding: “Aahh.”

“You have seen something?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

“Nothing,” said Mma Soleti, moving the focus of her gaze across to the other side of Mma Ramotswe’s face. “I have seen nothing that I didn’t think I’d see.”

Mma Ramotswe wondered what that meant, and was on the point of enquiring when Mma Soleti said, “Oh.”

“Is there anything wrong, Mma?”

“There is nothing wrong. This is a very good face, Mma. There can be no arguing about that. This is a good Botswana face.”

Mma Ramotswe was not sure what to make of that. She frowned, only to provoke an immediate warning from Mma Soleti. “Try not to frown, Mma. That makes lines on the face, and if you go on frowning, those lines will be there forever, even when you aren’t frowning inside.”