We went to the police. They made a big search and asked questions everywhere. Nobody knew anything about our son. I took time off from the school and searched the land around our village. We have some kopjes not too far away and there are boulders and caves over there. I went into each one of those caves and looked into every crevice. But there was no sign of my son.
He was a boy who liked to wander, because he had a strong interest in nature. He was always collecting rocks and things like that. He knew a lot about the bush and he would never get into danger from stupidity. There are no leopards in these parts anymore and we are too far away from the Kalahari for lions to come.
I went everywhere, calling, calling, but my son never answered me. I looked in every well of every farmer and village nearby and asked them to check the water. But there was no sign of him.
How can a boy vanish off the face of the Earth like this? If I were not a Christian, I would say that some evil spirit had lifted him up and carried him off. But I know that things like that do not really happen.
I am not a wealthy man. I cannot afford the services of a private detective, but I ask you, Mma, in the name of Jesus Christ, to help me in one small way. Please, when you are making your enquiries about other things, and talking to people who might know what goes on, please ask them if they have heard anything about a boy called Thobiso, aged eleven years and four months, who is the son of the teacher at Katsana Village. Please just ask them, and if you hear anything at all, please address a note to the undersigned, myself, the teacher.
In God’s name, Ernest Molai Pakotati, Dip.Ed.
Mma Makutsi stopped reading and looked across the room at Mma Ramotswe. For a moment, neither spoke. Then Mma Ramotswe broke the silence.
“Do you know anything about this?” she asked. “Have you heard anything about a boy going missing?”
Mma Makutsi frowned. “I think so. I think there was something in the newspaper about a search for a boy. I think they thought he might have run away from home for some reason.”
Mma Ramotswe rose to her feet and took the letter from her secretary. She held it as one might hold an exhibit in court—gingerly, so as not to disturb the evidence. It felt to her as if the letter—a mere scrap of paper, so light in itself—was weighted with pain.
“I don’t suppose there’s much I can do,” she said quietly. “Of course I can keep my ears open. I can tell the poor daddy that, but what else can I do? He will know the bush around Katsana. He will know the people. I can’t really do very much for him.”
Mma Makutsi seemed relieved. “No,” she said. “We can’t help that poor man.”
A letter was dictated by Mma Ramotswe, and Mma Makutsi typed it carefully into the typewriter. Then it was sealed in an envelope, a stamp stuck on the outside, and it was placed in the new red out-tray Mma Ramotswe had bought from the Botswana Book Centre. It was the second letter to leave the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, the first being Mma Malatsi’s bill for two hundred and fifty pula—the bill on the top of which Mma Makutsi had typed: “Your late husband—the solving of the mystery of his death.”
THAT EVENING, in the house in Zebra Drive, Mma Ramotswe prepared herself a meal of stew and pumpkin. She loved standing in the kitchen, stirring the pot, thinking over the events of the day, sipping at a large mug of bush tea which she balanced on the edge of the stove. Several things had happened that day, apart from the arrival of the letter. A man had come in with a query about a bad debt and she had reluctantly agreed to help him recover it. She was not sure whether this was the sort of thing which a private detective should do—there was nothing in the manual about it—but he was persistent and she found it difficult to refuse. Then there had been a visit from a woman who was concerned about her husband.
“He comes home smelling of perfume,” she said, “And smiling too. Why would a man come home smelling of perfume and smiling?”
“Perhaps he is seeing another woman,” ventured Mma Ramotswe.
The woman had looked at her aghast.
“Do you think he would do that? My husband?”
They had discussed the situation and it was agreed that the woman would tackle her husband on the subject.
“It’s possible that there is another explanation,” said Mma Ramotswe reassuringly.
“Such as?”
“Well …”
“Many men wear perfume these days,” offered Mma Makutsi. “They think it makes them smell good. You know how men smell.”
The client had turned in her chair and stared at Mma Makutsi.
“My husband does not smell,” she said. “He is a very clean man.”
Mma Ramotswe had thrown Mma Makutsi a warning look. She would have to have a word with her about keeping out of the way when clients were there.
But whatever else had happened that day, her thoughts kept returning to the teacher’s letter and the story of the missing boy. How the poor man must have fretted—and the mother, too. He did not say anything about a mother, but there must have been one, or a grandmother of course. What thoughts would have been in their minds as each hour went past with no sign of the boy, and all the time he could be in danger, stuck in an old mine shaft, perhaps, too hoarse to cry out anymore while rescuers beat about above him. Or stolen perhaps—whisked away by somebody in the night. What cruel heart could do such a thing to an innocent child? How could anybody resist the boy’s cries as he begged to be taken home? That such things could happen right there, in Botswana of all places, made her shiver with dread.
She began to wonder whether this was the right job for her after all. It was all very well thinking that one might help people to sort out their difficulties, but then these difficulties could be heartrending. The Malatsi case had been an odd one. She had expected Mma Malatsi to be distraught when she showed her the evidence that her husband had been eaten by a crocodile, but she had not seemed at all put out. What had she said? But then I have lots to do. What an extraordinary, unfeeling thing for somebody to say when she had just lost her husband. Did she not value him more than that?
Mma Ramotswe paused, her spoon dipped half below the surface of the simmering stew. When people were unmoved in that way, Mma Christie expected the reader to be suspicious. What would Mma Christie have thought if she had seen Mma Malatsi’s cool reaction, her virtual indifference? She would have thought: This woman killed her husband! That’s why she’s unmoved by the news of his death. She knew all along that he was dead!
But what about the crocodile and the baptism, and the other sinners? No, she must be innocent. Perhaps she wanted him dead, and then her prayer was answered by the crocodile. Would that make you a murderer in God’s eyes if something then happened? God would know, you see, that you had wanted somebody dead because there are no secrets that you can keep from God. Everybody knew that.
She stopped. It was time to
take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was
what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get
nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth.
That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A CONVERSATION WITH
MR J.L.B. MATEKONI
THE BOOKS did not look good. At the end of the first month of its existence, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was making a convincing loss. There had been three paying clients, and two who came for advice, received it, and declined to pay. Mma Malatsi had paid her bill for two hundred and fifty pula; Happy Bapetsi had paid two hundred pula for the exposure of her false father; and a local trader had paid one hundred pula to find out who was using his telephone to make unauthorised long-distance calls to Francistown. If one added this up it came to five hundred and fifty pula; but then Mma Makutsi’s wages were five hundred and eighty pula a month. This meant that there was a loss of thirty pula, without even taking into account other overheads, such as the cost of petrol for the tiny white van and the cost of electricity for the office.
Of course, businesses took some time to get established—Mma Ramotswe understood this—but how long could one go on at a loss? She had a certain amount of money left over from her father’s estate, but she could not live on that forever. She should have listened to her father; he had wanted her to buy a butchery, and that would have been so much safer. What was the expression they used? A blue-chip investment, that was it. But where was the excitement in that?
She thought of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. Now that was a business which would be making a profit. There was no shortage of customers, as everybody knew what a fine mechanic he was. That was the difference between them, she thought; he knew what he was doing, whereas she did not.
Mma Ramotswe had known Mr J.L.B. Matekoni for years. He came from Mochudi, and his uncle had been a close friend of her father. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was forty-five—ten years older than Mma Ramotswe, but he regarded himself as being a contemporary and often said, when making an observation about the world: “For people of our age …”
