The No. 2 Global Detective (7 page)

‘And I saw that above a window on the front of the car there was a sign that said ‘Gaborone'. Oh Mma, whatever can it mean?'

This was a good question and, for a moment, Mma Ontoaste was stumped. Behind her the typing of Mma Murakami was getting faster than ever and Mma Ontoaste was finding it hard to concentrate.

‘I will have to do some looking around, Mma, and I will let you know.'

‘Don't you want to know what he looks like?' asked the woman.

‘I am sorry, Mma,' replied Mma Ontoaste. ‘Descriptions are of no use to me. You see, all black men look the same to me.'

The woman looked puzzled as Mma Ontoaste began to walk with her towards the stock fence. Mma Ontoaste walked Mma Arimuhapwa through the stock gate and they stood for a second by the side of the road.

‘I am sure your husband will turn up, Mma. It is not uncommon that men go away for a bit every day.'

It was while Mma Ontoaste was saying this that a grey bus appeared along the road in the direction of Gaborone, heading towards them.

‘Look, Mma!' cried the woman, pointing down the road over Mma Ontoaste's shoulder. Her eyes were big and round and she was clearly terrified.

‘Another one of those strange cars! We must be careful that it does not eat us up alive!'

Mma Arimuhapwa turned and ran up the road away from the approaching bus, her hands waggling in the air.

‘Aiyeeee!' she cried.

A sign on the front of the bus read Lobatse and just as the bus drew level with a pole in the side of the road and the fleeing Mma Arimuhapwa, it stopped. Out stepped a man wearing a suit and tie. In his hand he had a briefcase and it looked as if he had just come back from work in one of the government offices in Gaborone.

This, observed Mma Ontoaste with some satisfaction, might be the missing government office worker Machende Arimuhapwa.

^5.
Again! But what does it
mean
?

It's moral dilemma time again! They cried.

The next morning Mma Ontoaste was wide awake in time for her 11 o'clock Moral Dilemma. She could see that an important client had arrived and was standing waiting under the
mopane
tree. Mma Ontoaste wondered why someone might hang about under a tree – such a dismal spot – rather than wait in the waiting room of the grass hut, but that was for them. Some people were just backward: pig-ignorant, stuck in their ways. Mma Ontoaste could hear Mma Murakami's jazz playing loudly now, and she began to like what she heard.

The client who had been standing beneath the
mopane
tree was a lady of about the same age as Mma Ontoaste, but as she emerged from the shade and came to sit down at the proffered chair, Mma Ontoaste could see that this lady was fat. She was at least a size 22 and for a second Mma Ontoaste feared for her supplies of cake. This lady looks as if she might be able to eat me out of hut and home, thought Mma Ontoaste, and she suddenly decided not to offer her any cake. It was as simple as that and once she had made the decision, Mma Ontoaste felt happy. It would be silly to waste cake on a person like this. It would be like trying to fill Lake Victoria with bush tea.

‘Mma, what can I do for you?' Mma Ontoaste asked, ignoring the slightly thirsty noises the woman was making as she slumped into the chair.

‘Oh, Mma,' said the lady, ‘I can see you are an old-fashioned lady and that you take the time to talk—'

Mma Ontoaste rolled her eyes and promised herself that she would buy herself a stopwatch of the sort that were used in chess matches. That way she would be able to time people as they spoke and make it very clear to them that she was the owner of
The Best Detective Agency in the World Ever! No. 2
, and not just some nosey old curtain twitcher with a little too much time on her hands.

‘Yes, yes, Mma. Never mind all that. Time is money. What can I do for you?'

The woman was taken aback, but she carried on as best she could.

‘Mma, I have a friend who is a woman who used to work as an assistant to a lady private detective but has been given the sack because the private detective thought that she had not achieved a high enough score in some secretarial exams.'

‘Right,' said Mma Ontoaste wearily. ‘So?'

‘Well, a few weeks ago I saw a lion in my garden and I was very frightened and so my friend – the same one who is very upset, I should say – lent me a gun.'

‘A gun?'

‘Yes: a big black gun, full of bullets. It is, I think, big enough to stop an elephant in its tracks.'

‘It sounds very dangerous, Mma.'

‘It is. And yesterday my friend asked me if I could give it back to her.'

Mma Ontoaste sat back on her chair and looked at her client. She was trying to stifle a yawn.

‘Mma,' she said. ‘Why are you telling me this?'

‘Because I have a problem, Mma, which I need to sort out. I am a virtuous woman, as you know, and in ordinary circumstances I should hand the gun straight back to my friend, shouldn't I?'

‘Of course,' agreed Mma Ontoaste.

‘But,' the lady went on. ‘My friend is very unhappy about having lost her job, Mma.'

‘Oh, Mma, that is very bad,' said Mma Ontoaste.

‘Yes. In fact, she has gone quite crazy. You see, she feels that she was unjustly treated.'

‘Injustice is a bad thing, a bad thing indeed. Your friend is right to be upset Mma.'

‘Yes. I feel I should give her the gun back, Mma, but I am worried she will do something dangerous with it. She might even go after her ex-employer and shoot her in her big fat head with the gun. Twice or even three times until her ex-employer is quite dead, Mma.'

Mma Ontoaste thought for a second. After a second she knew the answer.

‘You must give her the gun back, Mma. That is your duty as a virtuous woman. What your friend then does with the gun is up to her.'

The woman in the chair was silent for a minute. Then she slapped her hands on the arms of the chair and hauled herself to her feet. It was as if something had just been decided, but Mma Ontoaste could not say for sure what it was.

‘Very well,' the lady said. ‘I shall give her the gun tonight.'

‘Good,' said Mma Ontoaste. ‘And now I have to go and have some lunch. I am starving.'

Mma Ontoaste relieved the woman of 5000 Pula and then, since Mma Murakami was still hard at work and not in a position to join her for lunch, Mma Ontoaste went to find her husband, that good man, Mr JPS Spagatoni, in his chip supper shop out by the old Ulster Defence headquarters, on Murieston Road.

It was here at the Salt-'n'-Sauce Scotch Chip Supper Shop that Mr JPS Spagatoni served up the finest example of Scotch cuisine that sub-Saharan Africa had to offer. He battered everything from Mars bars to fillets of impala before dipping them into seething brown fat and, once they were cooked through, keeping them under heat lamps for as long as a week at a time and then selling them to passing drunks. He was especially proud of his deep-fried battered Pizza Calzone, which, when covered with special brown sauce and served with a solid fist of damp chips, made the perfect supper for any right-thinking person.

Too many people these days were worried about the effect such suppers might have on a human's digestion over a prolonged period of time, thought Mma Ontoaste, but her own beloved father, who had also fallen in love with the Scotch diet, had lived on such a diet until he had been taken happily, without a word of protest, at the age of 36, knowing his time was up.

It was as she was walking through the yard, with her footsteps especially firm so as to alert any snakes who were apt at this time of day to be at their most somnolent and therefore at their most dangerous, that Mma Ontoaste remembered of course that her former assistant, Mma Pollosopresso, had, in an act of vengeance that had taken Mma Ontoaste's breath away, both literally and figuratively, detonated a sizeable bomb under the tiny white van that she had driven about the streets of Gaborone ever since receiving it as a graduation present from her dear (albeit dead) daddy.

This was a pity because Mma Ontoaste had given a lot of thought to which vehicle would be suitable for a lady detective of her standing, and the tiny white van, she had decided, had been perfect. Replacing it with anything else now would be difficult. There were no detectives she could think of who rented their cars, or who just drove blue cars, say, or red cars, or yellow cars, or who changed their car with each book. Of course it was a bit of a cheap trick to give a detective the characteristic of driving a particular car, as if the choice of car might say anything more about them than their choice of shoes, but it was memorable, and that Mma Ontoaste had to admit. Mma Ontoaste tried to think of any other type of character so easily identified by their car as, for example, Inspector Morse was by his old Jaguar, or even, Heaven help us, ‘Jim' Bergerac was by his Triumph.

Could she not come up with anything better than that? Mma Ontoaste wondered. She recalled her Supervisor at Cuff College advising them that their choice of vehicle was just as important as their choice of companion. And yet had Mma Ontoaste not just replaced her companion? Perhaps this could be her trick? Could she not just go down to a garage in Gaborone and buy a hybrid car?

In the meantime she would have to get a bus. But after the affair of the missing government office worker Machende Arimuhapwa, the bus company (whose motto was ‘We Guarantee to Get You There Alive if at all Possible') did not instil confidence. It was as she was thinking this that her eye fell upon the small herd of cattle that her dear daddy had left her in that never-to-be-forgotten will. Would a cow do? she wondered. Could Mma Ontoaste ride a cow on her investigations? Whyever not? she thought. In many ways a cow would make an ideal mount. They were solid and dependable, much like her beloved Botswana, and one could hang things from their horns such as bags of produce one had bought from the market in Castle Terrace.

The only problem with the new plan was that Mma Ontoaste was a large woman who might very easily crush the cow to death. This was a serious problem. Mma Ontoaste could have lost some weight, of course, and there was some medical evidence to suggest that it was not healthy to be so heavily ‘built', but it was good to be fat and that, as her husband Mr JPS Spagatoni, that good man, that good man who fried chips for a living, might say, was that. Some people liked modern-shaped ladies, of course, of the sort who could resist the temptation of an extra slice of cake with their bush tea in the afternoons while they were sitting and talking to old friends, but Mma Delicious Ontoaste was not one of these ladies. She was the sort of lady who knew the importance of sitting and eating and so, when she approached the herd of cows, sheltering in the shade of a
mopane
tree, she did so with consideration for the pain that she might be about to inflict upon one of their number.

In which a bottle of Irn-Bru comes between a man and his wife with some quite bad consequences.

It was just as Mr JPS Spagatoni of the Salt-'n'-Sauce Scotch Chip Supper Shop on Murieston Road, Botswana's leading Scotch chip shop, was drying his hands on another piece of clean lint and watching one of the trainee fryers cut a cauliflower into individual florets for dipping in batter, that he realised that something was wrong. Mr JPS Spagatoni was a good man, but that is not to say he was a clever man, and so, although he was the best fryer of pizza Calzone suppers in the land – a fact of which he was enormously proud – it took him some moments to realise what it was that had been bothering him for the past few days. There was, he finally realised, no music.

The radio, which he had kept on the top shelf on the wall behind the counter, along with catering-sized jars of pickled eggs and boxes of spare plastic chip forks, was missing. It had been an old leather-bound Roberts transistor radio with a coat-hanger in place of an aerial, and Forth Radio had been playing in the shop for as long as Mr JPS Spagatoni could remember. Now though all he could hear was the steady buzz of the extractor fan and the low murmur of the seething oil. Where was the radio?

‘Dennis?' he asked the trainee. ‘Have you seen the radio? It was up there on that shelf and now it has gone.'

‘No, Rra,' said Dennis. ‘I have not seen the radio.'

This seemed straightforward enough. So the radio had been stolen. Thank God I am just a humble fryer of fish, thought Mr JPS Spagatoni, and not a great detective like Mma Ontoaste. She will know what to do in a case like this. Mma Ontoaste would be able to come up with a plan.

And at that moment, through the door of his chip shop Mr JPS Spagatoni, that good man, saw Mma Ontoaste arriving outside, struggling to parallel park her cow on Murieston Road.

Mr JPS Spagatoni and Mma Ontoaste had been married for three years now and in all that time, so busy had they been with foaming bush tea, errant vans, frying potato suppers and staring at the scenery that they had spent not one minute alone together, and so no one in Botswana, that good country, could say for certain what they did when they were alone, or comment on the state of their relationship, and this, perhaps, was a good thing. There was too much of that sort of thing in the world. After all, whose business was it what they did when they were alone? Mma Ontoaste and Mr JPS Spagatoni had shown that it was possible to glean an idea of someone's character without intruding on their most private or intimate moments. But no one who knew them even in passing could resist speculating on what really lay between them and, in the vacuum, the theories were legion.

While Mma Ontoaste ate a pizza Calzone supper with extra salt and sauce, Mr JPS Spagatoni told her about the missing radio. Mma Ontoaste listened in silence, her eye drifting over the entertainment section of the newspaper, and when Mr JPS Spagatoni had finished he stepped back and waited to hear what her plan would be.