Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (17 page)

She drained her glass.

“I must go,”
she said, and then, after a short pause: “Maybe you’d like to come
back for a drink at my place. I’ve got some beer there.”

He
smiled. “Yes. That’s a good idea. I had nothing to do
either.”

He followed her home in his car and together they went
into her house and turned on some music. She poured him a beer, and he drank
half of it in one gulp. Then he put his arm around her waist, and told her that
he liked good, fat women. All this business about being thin was nonsense and
was quite wrong for Africa.

“Fat women like you are what men
really want,” he said.

She giggled. He was charming, she had to
admit it, but this was work and she must be quite professional. She must
remember that she needed evidence, and that might be more difficult to
get.

“Come and sit by me,” she said. “You must be
tired after standing up all day, sorting diamonds.”

SHE HAD her excuses ready, and he accepted them
without protest. She had to be at work early the next morning and he could not
stay. But it would be a pity to end such a good evening and have no memento of
it.

“I want to take a photograph of us, just for me to keep. So
that I can look at it and remember tonight.”

He smiled at her and
pinched her gently.

“Good idea.”

So she set up her
camera, with its delayed switch, and leapt back on the sofa to join him. He
pinched her again and put his arm around her and kissed her passionately as the
flash went off.

“We can publish that in the newspapers if you
like,” he said. “Mr Handsome with his friend Miss
Fatty.”

She laughed. “You’re a ladies’ man all
right, Kremlin. You’re a real ladies’ man. I knew it first time I
saw you.”

“Well somebody has to look after the
ladies,” he said.

ALICE BUSANG returned
to the office that Friday and found Mma Ramotswe waiting for her.

“I’m afraid that I can tell you that your husband is
unfaithful,” she said. “I’ve got proof.”

Alice
closed her eyes. She had expected this, but she had not wanted it. She would
kill him, she thought; but no, I still love him. I hate him. No, I love
him.

Mma Ramotswe handed her the photograph. “There’s your
proof,” she said.

Alice Busang stared at the picture. Surely not!
Yes, it was her! It was the detective lady.

“You …”
she stuttered. “You were with my husband?”

“He was
with me,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You wanted proof, didn’t you? I
got the best proof you could hope for.”

Alice Busang dropped the
photograph.

“But you … you went with my husband. You
…”

Mma Ramotswe frowned. “You asked me to trap him,
didn’t you?”

Alice Busang’s eyes narrowed. “You
bitch!” she screamed. “You fat bitch! You took my Kremlin! You
husband-stealer! Thief!”

Mma Ramotswe looked at her client with
dismay. This would be a case, she thought, where she might have to waive the
fee.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

MR J.L.B. MATEKONI’S DISCOVERY

A
LICE BUSANG was ushered out of the agency still
shouting her insults at Mma Ramotswe.

“You fat tart! You
think you’re a detective! You’re just man hungry, like all those
bar girls! Don’t be taken in everyone! This woman isn’t a
detective. No. 1 Husband Stealing Agency, that’s what this
is!”

When the row had died away, Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi
looked at one another. What could one do but laugh? That woman had known all
along what her husband was up to, but had insisted on proof. And when she got
the proof, she blamed the messenger.

“Look after the office while
I go off to the garage,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I just have to tell Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni about this.”

He was in his glass-fronted office
cubicle, tinkering with a distributor cap.

“Sand gets everywhere
these days,” he said. “Look at this.”

He extracted a
fragment of silica from a metal duct and showed it triumphantly to his
visitor.

“This little thing stopped a large truck in its
tracks,” he said. “This tiny piece of sand.”

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,” said Mma Ramotswe,
remembering a distant afternoon in the Mochudi Government School when the
teacher had quoted this to them. “For want of a shoe, the …”
She stopped. It refused to come back.

“The horse fell
down,” volunteered Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “I was taught that
too.”

He put the distributor cap down on his table and went off
to fill the kettle. It was a hot afternoon, and a cup of tea would make them
both feel better.

She told him about Alice Busang and her reaction to
the proof of Kremlin’s activities.

“You should have seen
him,” she said. “A real ladies’ man. Stuff in his hair. Dark
glasses. Fancy shoes. He had no idea how funny he looked. I much prefer men
with ordinary shoes and honest trousers.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni cast
an anxious glance down at his shoes—scruffy old suede boots covered with
grease—and at his trousers. Were they honest?

“I
couldn’t even charge her a fee,” Mma Ramotswe went on. “Not
after that.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni nodded. He seemed preoccupied by
something. He had not picked up the distributor cap again and was staring out
of the window.

“You’re worried about something?” She
wondered whether her refusal of his proposal had upset him more than she
imagined. He was not the sort to bear grudges, but did he resent her? She did
not want to lose his friendship—he was her best friend in town, in a way,
and life without his comforting presence would be distinctly the poorer. Why
did love—and sex—complicate life so much? It would be far simpler
for us not to have to worry about them. Sex played no part in her life now and
she found that a great relief. She did not have to worry how she looked; what
people thought of her. How terrible to be a man, and to have sex on one’s
mind all the time, as men are supposed to do. She had read in one of her
magazines that the average man thought about sex over sixty times a day! She
could not believe that figure, but studies had apparently revealed it. The
average man, going about his daily business, had all those thoughts in his
mind; thoughts of pushing and shoving, as men do, while he was actually doing
something else! Did doctors think about it as they took your pulse? Did lawyers
think about it as they sat at their desks and plotted? Did pilots think about
it as they flew their aeroplanes? It simply beggared belief.

And Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni, with his innocent expression and his plain face, was he
thinking about it while he looked into distributor caps or heaved batteries out
of engines? She looked at him; how could one tell? Did a man thinking about sex
start to leer, or open his mouth and show his pink tongue, or … No. That
was impossible.

“What are you thinking about, Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni?” The question slipped out, and she immediately regretted it. It
was as if she had challenged him to confess that he was thinking about
sex.

He stood up and closed the door, which had been slightly ajar.
There was nobody to overhear them. The two mechanics were at the other end of
the garage, drinking their afternoon tea, thinking about sex, thought Mma
Ramotswe.

“If you hadn’t come to see me, I would have come
to see you,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “I have found something, you
see.”

She felt relieved; so he was not upset about her turning
him down. She looked at him expectantly.

“There was an
accident,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “It was not a bad one. Nobody
was hurt. Shaken a bit, but not hurt. It was at the old four-way stop. A truck
coming along from the roundabout didn’t stop. It hit a car coming from
the Village. The car was pushed into the storm ditch and was quite badly
dented. The truck had a smashed headlight and a little bit of damage to the
radiator. That’s all.”

“And?”

Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni sat down and stared at his hands.

“I was called to pull
the car out of the ditch. I took my rescue truck and we winched it up. Then we
towed it back here and left it round the back. I’ll show it to you
later.”

He paused for a moment before continuing. The story
seemed simple enough, but it appeared to be costing him a considerable effort
to tell it.

“I looked it over. It was a panel-beating job and I
could easily get my panel-beater to take it off to his workshop and sort it
out. But there were one or two things I would have to do first. I had to check
the electrics, for a start. These new expensive cars have so much wiring that a
little knock here or there can make everything go wrong. You won’t be
able to lock your doors if the wires are nicked. Or your antitheft devices will
freeze everything solid. It’s very complicated, as those two boys out
there drinking their tea on my time are only just finding out.”

“Anyway, I had to get at a fuse box under the dashboard, and while I
was doing this, I inadvertently opened the glove compartment. I looked
inside—I don’t know why—but something made me do it. And I
found something. A little bag.”

Mma Ramotswe’s mind was
racing ahead. He had stumbled upon illicit diamonds—she was sure of
it.

“Diamonds?”

“No,” said Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni. “Worse than that.”

SHE
LOOKED at the small bag which he had taken out of his safe and placed on the
table. It was made of animal skin—a pouch really—and was similar to
the bags which the Basarwa ornamented with fragments of ostrich shell and used
to store herbs and pastes for their arrows.

“I’ll open
it,” he said. “I don’t want to make you touch it.”

She watched as he untied the strings that closed the mouth of the bag. His
expression was one of distaste, as if he were handling something with an
offensive smell.

And there was a smell, a dry, musty odour, as he
extracted the three small objects from the bag. Now she understood. He need say
nothing further. Now she understood why he had seemed so distracted and
uncomfortable. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had found muti. He had found medicine.

She said nothing as the objects were laid out on the table. What could one
say about these pitiful remnants, about the bone, about the piece of skin,
about the little wooden bottle, stoppered, and its awful contents?

Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni, reluctant to touch the objects, poked at the bone with a
pencil.

“See,” he said simply. “That’s what I
found.”

Mma Ramotswe got up from her chair and walked towards the
door. She felt her stomach heave, as one does when confronted with a nauseous
odour, a dead donkey in a ditch, the overpowering smell of carrion.

The
feeling passed and she turned round.

“I’m going to take
that bone and check,” she said. “We could be wrong. It could be an
animal. A duiker. A hare.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head.
“It won’t be,” he said. “I know what they’ll
say.”

“Even so,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Put it in
an envelope and I’ll take it.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni opened
his mouth to speak, but thought better of it. He was going to warn her, to tell
her that it was dangerous to play around with these things, but that would
imply that one believed in their power, and he did not. Did he?

She put
the envelope in her pocket and smiled.

“Nothing can happen to me
now,” she said. “I’m protected.”

Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni tried to laugh at her joke, but found that he could not. It was
tempting Providence to use those words and he hoped that she would not have
cause to regret them.

“There’s one thing I’d like to
know,” said Mma Ramotswe, as she left the office. “That
car—who owned it?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni glanced at the two
mechanics. They were both out of earshot, but he lowered his voice nonetheless
while he told her.

“Charlie Gotso,” he said. “Him.
That one.”

Mma Ramotswe’s eyes widened.

“Gotso? The important one?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni nodded.
Everyone knew Charlie Gotso. He was one of the most influential men in the
country. He had the ear of … well, he had the ear of just about everyone
who counted. There was no door in the country closed to him, nobody who would
turn down a request for a favour. If Charlie Gotso asked you to do something
for him, you did it. If you did not, then you might find that life became more
difficult later on. It was always very subtly done—your application for a
licence for your business may encounter unexpected delays; or you may find that
there always seemed to be speed traps on your particular route to work; or your
staff grew restless and went to work for somebody else. There was never
anything you could put your finger on—that was not the way in Botswana,
but the effect would be very real.

“Oh dear,” said Mma
Ramotswe.