He was a comfortable man, and she wondered why he had never married. He was not handsome, but he had an easy, reassuring face. He would have been the sort of husband that any woman would have liked to have about the house. He would fix things and stay in at night and perhaps even help with some of the domestic chores—something that so few men would ever dream of doing.
But he had remained single, and lived alone in a large house near the old airfield. She sometimes saw him sitting on his verandah when she drove past—Mr J.L.B. Matekoni by himself, sitting on a chair, staring out at the trees that grew in his garden. What did a man like that think about? Did he sit there and reflect on how nice it would be to have a wife, with children running around the garden, or did he sit there and think about the garage and the cars he had fixed? It was impossible to tell.
She liked to call on him at the garage and talk to him in his greasy office with its piles of receipts and orders for spare parts. She liked to look at the calendars on the wall, with their simple pictures of the sort that men liked. She liked to drink tea from one of his mugs with the greasy fingerprints on the outside while his two assistants raised cars on jacks and cluttered and banged about underneath.
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni enjoyed these sessions. They would talk about Mochudi, or politics, or just exchange the news of the day. He would tell her who was having trouble with his car, and what was wrong with it, and who had bought petrol that day, and where they said they were going.
But that day they talked about finances, and about the problems of running a paying business.
“Staff costs are the biggest item,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “You see those two young boys out there under that car? You’ve no idea what they cost me. Their wages, their taxes, the insurance to cover them if that car were to fall on their heads. It all adds up. And at the end of the day there are just one or two pula left for me. Never much more.”
“But at least you aren’t making a loss,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I’m thirty pula down on my first month’s trading. And I’m sure it’ll get worse.”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sighed. “Staff costs,” he said. “That secretary of yours—the one with those big glasses. That’s where the money will be going.”
Mma Ramotswe nodded. “I know,” she said. “But you need a secretary if you have an office. If I didn’t have a secretary, then I’d be stuck there all day. I couldn’t come over here and talk to you. I couldn’t go shopping.”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni reached for his mug. “Then you need to get better clients,” he said. “You need a couple of big cases. You need somebody rich to give you a case.”
“Somebody rich?”
“Yes. Somebody like … like Mr Patel, for example.”
“Why would he need a private detective?”
“Rich men have their problems,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “You never know.”
They lapsed into silence, watching the two young mechanics remove a wheel from the car on which they were working.
“Stupid boys,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “They don’t need to do that.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I had a letter the other day. It made me very sad, and I wondered whether I should be a detective after all.”
She told him of the letter about the missing boy, and she explained how she had felt unable to help the father.
“I couldn’t do anything for him,” she said. “I’m not a miracle worker. But I felt so sorry for him. He thought that his son had fallen in the bush or been taken by some animal. How could a father bear that?”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni snorted. “I saw that in the paper,” he said. “I read about that search. And I knew it was hopeless from the beginning.”
“Why?” asked Mma Ramotswe.
For a moment, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was silent. Mma Ramotswe looked at him, and past him, through the window to the thorn tree outside. The tiny grey-green leaves, like blades of grass, were folded in upon themselves, against the heat; and beyond them the empty sky, so pale as to be white; and the smell of dust.
“Because that boy’s dead,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, tracing an imaginary pattern in the air with his finger. “No animal took him, or at least no ordinary animal. A santawana maybe, a thokolosi. Oh yes.”
Mma Ramotswe was silent. She imagined the father—the father of the dead boy, and for a brief moment she remembered that awful afternoon in Mochudi, at the hospital, when the nurse had come up to her, straightening her uniform, and she saw that the nurse was crying. To lose a child, like that, was something that could end one’s world. One could never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared. The birds became silent.
“Why do you say he’s dead?” she asked. “He could have got lost and then …”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head. “No,” he said. “That boy would have been taken for witchcraft. He’s dead now.”
She put her empty mug down on the table. Outside, in the workshop, a wheel brace was dropped with a loud, clanging sound.
She glanced at her friend. This was a subject that one did not talk about. This was the one subject which would bring fear to the most resolute heart. This was the great taboo.
“How can you be sure?”
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni smiled. “Come on, now, Mma Ramotswe. You know as well as I do what goes on. We don’t like to talk about it do we? It’s the thing we Africans are most ashamed of. We know it happens but we pretend it doesn’t. We know all right what happens to children who go missing. We know.”
She looked up at him. Of course he was telling the truth, because he was a truthful, good man. And he was probably right—no matter how much everybody would like to think of other, innocent explanations as to what had happened to a missing boy, the most likely thing was exactly what Mr J.L.B. Matekoni said. The boy had been taken by a witch doctor and killed for medicine. Right there, in Botswana, in the late twentieth century, under that proud flag, in the midst of all that made Botswana a modern country, this thing had happened, this heart of darkness had thumped out like a drum. The little boy had been killed because some powerful person somewhere had commissioned the witch doctor to make strengthening medicine for him.
She cast her eyes down.
“You may be right,” she said. “That poor boy …”
“Of course I’m right,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “And why do you think that poor man had to write that letter to you? It’s because the police will be doing nothing to find out how and where it happened. Because they’re scared. Every one of them. They’re just as scared as I am and those two boys out there under that car are. Scared, Mma Ramotswe. Frightened for our lives. Every one of us—maybe even you.”
MMA RAMOTSWE went to bed at ten that night, half an hour later than usual. She liked to lie in bed sometimes, with her reading lamp on, and read a magazine. Now she was tired, and the magazine kept slipping from her hands, defeating her struggles to keep awake.
She turned out the light and said her prayers, whispering the words although there was nobody in the house to hear her. It was always the same prayer, for the soul of her father, Obed, for Botswana and for rain that would make the crops grow and the cattle fat, and for her little baby, now safe in the arms of Jesus.
In the early hours of the morning she awoke in terror, her heartbeat irregular, her mouth dry. She sat up and reached for the light switch, but when she turned it on nothing happened. She pushed her sheet aside—there was no need for a blanket in the hot weather—and slipped off the bed.
The light in the corridor did not work either, nor that in the kitchen, where the moon made shadows and shapes on the floor. She looked out of the window, into the night. There were no lights anywhere; a power cut.
She opened the back door and stepped out into the yard in her bare feet. The town was in darkness, the trees obscure, indeterminate shapes, clumps of black.
