Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (23 page)

“We need more women
in public life,” said Dr Maketsi. “They are very practical people,
women. Unlike us men.”

Mma Ramotswe was quick to agree. “If
more women were in power, they wouldn’t let wars break out,” she
said. “Women can’t be bothered with all this fighting. We see war
for what it is—a matter of broken bodies and crying mothers.”

Dr Maketsi thought for a moment. He was thinking of Mrs Ghandi, who had a
war, and Mrs Golda Meir, who also had a war, and then there was …

“Most of the time,” he conceded. “Women are gentle most
of the time, but they can be tough when they need to be.”

Dr
Maketsi was eager to change the subject now, as he feared that Mma Ramotswe
might go on to ask him whether he could cook, and he did not want a repetition
of the conversation he had had with a young woman who had returned from a year
in the United States. She had said to him, challengingly, as if the difference
in their ages were of no consequence: “If you eat, you should cook.
It’s as simple as that.” These ideas came from America and may be
all very well in theory, but had they made the Americans any happier? Surely
there had to be some limits to all this progress, all this unsettling change.
He had heard recently of men who were obliged by their wives to change the
nappies of their babies. He shuddered at the thought; Africa was not ready for
that, he reflected. There were some aspects of the old arrangements in Africa
which were very appropriate and comfortable—if you were a man, which of
course Dr Maketsi was.

“But these are big issues,” he said
jovially. “Talking about pumpkins doesn’t make them grow.”
His mother-in-law said this frequently, and although he disagreed with almost
everything she said, he found himself echoing her words only too often.

Mma Ramotswe laughed. “Why have you come to see me?” she said.
“Do you want me to find you a new wife, maybe?”

Dr Maketsi
clicked his tongue in mock disapproval. “I have come about a real
problem,” he said. “Not just about a little question of
wives.”

Mma Ramotswe listened as the doctor explained just how
delicate his problem was and she assured him that she, like him, believed in
confidentiality.

“Not even my secretary will get to hear what you
tell me,” she said.

“Good,” said Dr Maketsi.
“Because if I am wrong about this, and if anybody hears about it, I shall
be very seriously embarrassed—as will the whole hospital. I don’t
want the Minister coming looking for me.”

“I
understand,” said Mma Ramotswe. Her curiosity was thoroughly aroused now,
and she was anxious to hear what juicy matter was troubling her friend. She had
been burdened with several rather mundane cases recently, including a very
demeaning one which involved tracing a rich man’s dog. A dog! The only
lady detective in the country should not have to stoop to such depths and
indeed Mma Ramotswe would not have done so, had it not been for the fact that
she needed the fee. The little white van had developed an ominous rattle in the
engine and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, called upon to consider the problem, had gently
broken the news to her that it needed expensive repairs. And what a terrible,
malodorous dog it had turned out to be; when she eventually found the animal
being dragged along on a string by the group of urchins which had stolen it,
the dog had rewarded its liberator with a bite on the ankle.

“I
am worried about one of our young doctors,” said Dr Maketsi. “He is
called Dr Komoti. He’s Nigerian.”

“I see.”

“I know that some people are suspicious of Nigerians,” said Dr
Maketsi.

“I believe that there are some people like that,”
said Mma Ramotswe, catching the doctor’s eye and then looking away again
quickly, almost guiltily.

Dr Maketsi drank the last of his bush tea and
replaced his mug on the table.

“Let me tell you about our Dr
Komoti,” he said. “Starting from the time he first turned up for
interview. It was my job to interview him, in fact, although I must admit that
it was rather a formality. We were desperately short of people at the time and
needed somebody who would be able to lend a hand in casualty. We can’t
really be too choosy, you know. Anyway, he seemed to have a reasonable C.V. and
he had brought several references with him. He had been working in Nairobi for
a few years, and so I telephoned the hospital he was at and they confirmed that
he was perfectly all right. So I took him on.

“He started about
six months ago. He was pretty busy in casualty. You probably know what
it’s like in there. Road accidents, fights, the usual Friday evening
business. Of course a lot of the work is just cleaning up, stopping the
bleeding, the occasional resuscitation—that sort of thing.

“Everything seemed to be going well, but after Dr Komoti had been
there about three weeks the consultant in charge had a word with me. He said
that he thought that the new doctor was a bit rusty and that some of the things
he did seemed a bit surprising. For example, he had sewed several wounds up
quite badly and the stitching had to be redone.

“But sometimes
he was really quite good. For example, a couple of weeks ago we had a woman
coming in with a tension pneumothorax. That’s a pretty serious matter.
Air gets into the space round the lungs and makes the lung collapse, like a
popped balloon. If this happens, you have to drain the air out as quickly as
you can so that the lung can expand again.

“This is quite a
tricky job for an inexperienced doctor. You’ve got to know where to put
in the drain. If you get it wrong you could even puncture the heart or do all
sorts of other damage. If you don’t do it quickly, the patient can die. I
almost lost somebody myself with one of these a few years ago. I got quite a
fright over it.

“Dr Komoti turned out to be pretty good at this,
and he undoubtedly saved this woman’s life. The consultant turned up
towards the end of the procedure and he let him finish it. He was impressed,
and mentioned it to me. But at the same time, this is the same doctor who had
failed to spot an obvious case of enlarged spleen the day before.”

“He’s inconsistent?” said Mma Ramotswe.

“Exactly,” said Dr Maketsi. “One day he’ll be fine,
but the next day he’ll come close to killing some unfortunate
patient.”

Mma Ramotswe thought for a moment, remembering a news
item in
The Star
. “I was reading the other day about a bogus
surgeon in Johannesburg,” she said. “He practised for almost ten
years and nobody knew that he had no qualifications. Then somebody spotted
something by chance and they exposed him.”

“It’s
extraordinary,” said Dr Maketsi. “These cases crop up from time to
time. And these people often get away with it for a long time—for years
sometimes.”

“Did you check up on his qualifications?”
asked Mma Ramotswe. “It’s easy enough to forge documents these days
with photocopiers and laser printers—anybody can do it. Maybe he’s
not a doctor at all. He could have been a hospital porter or something like
that.”

Dr Maketsi shook his head. “We went through all
that,” he said. “We checked with his Medical School in
Nigeria—that was a battle, I can tell you—and we also checked with
the General Medical Council in Britain, where he did a registrar’s job
for two years. We even obtained a photograph from Nairobi, and it’s the
same man. So I’m pretty sure that he’s exactly who he says he
is.”

“Couldn’t you just test him?” asked Mma
Ramotswe. “Couldn’t you try to find out how much he knows about
medicine by just asking him some tricky questions?”

Dr Maketsi
smiled. “I’ve done that already. I’ve taken the opportunity
to speak to him about one or two difficult cases. On the first occasion he
coped quite well, and he gave a fairly good answer. He clearly knew what he was
talking about. But on the second occasion, he seemed evasive. He said that he
wanted to think about it. This annoyed me, and so I mentioned something about
the case we had discussed before. This took him off his guard, and he just
mumbled something inconsequential. It was as if he had forgotten what
he’d said to me three days before.”

Mma Ramotswe looked up
at the ceiling. She knew about forgetfulness. Her poor Daddy had become
forgetful at the end and had sometimes barely remembered her. That was
understandable in the old, but not in a young doctor. Unless he was ill, of
course, and in that case something could have gone wrong with his memory.

“There’s nothing wrong with him mentally,” said Dr
Maketsi, as if predicting her question. “As far as I can tell, that is.
This isn’t a case of pre-senile dementia or anything like that. What
I’m afraid of is drugs. I think that he’s possibly abusing drugs
and that half the time he’s treating patients he’s not exactly
there.”

Dr Maketsi paused. He had delivered his bombshell, and he
sat back, as if silenced by the implications of what he had said. This was
almost as bad as if they had been allowing an unqualified doctor to practise.
If the Minister heard that a doctor was treating patients in the hospital while
high on drugs, he might begin to question the closeness of supervision in the
hospital.

He imagined the interview. “Now Dr Maketsi, could you
not see from the way this man was behaving that he was drugged? Surely you
people should be able to spot things like that. If it’s obvious enough to
me when I walk down the street that somebody has been smoking
dagga,
then surely it should be obvious enough to somebody like you. Or am I fondly
imagining that you people are more perceptive than you really are
…”

“I can see why you’re worried,” said
Mma Ramotswe. “But I’m not sure whether I can help. I don’t
really know my way around the drug scene. That’s really a police
matter.”

Dr Maketsi was dismissive. “Don’t talk to me
about the police,” he said. “They never keep their mouths shut. If
I went to them to get this looked into, they’d treat it as a
straightforward drugs enquiry. They’d barge in and search his house and
then somebody would talk about it. In no time at all word would be all about
town that he was a drug addict.” He paused, concerned that Mma Ramotswe
should understand the subtleties of his dilemma. “And what if he
isn’t? What if I’m wrong? Then I would have as good as killed his
reputation for no reason. He may be incompetent from time to time, but
that’s no reason for destroying him.”

“But if we did
find out that he was using drugs,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And
I’m not sure how we could do this, what then? Would you dismiss
him?”

Dr Maketsi shook his head vigorously. “We don’t
think about drugs in those terms. It isn’t a question of good behaviour
and bad behaviour. I’d look on it as a medical problem and I’d try
to help him. I’d try to sort out the problem.”

“But
you can’t ‘sort out’ with those people,” said Mma
Ramotswe. “Smoking
dagga
is one thing, but using pills and all
the rest is another. Show me one reformed drug addict. Just one. Maybe they
exist; I’ve just never seen them.”

Dr Maketsi shrugged.
“I know they can be very manipulative people,” he said. “But
some of them get off it. I can show you some figures.”

“Well, maybe, maybe not,” said Mma Ramotswe. “The point
is: what do you want me to do?”

“Find out about him,”
said Dr Maketsi. “Follow him for a few days. Find out whether he’s
involved in the drug scene. If he is, find out whether he’s supplying
others with drugs while you are about it. Because that will be another problem
for us. We keep a tight rein on drugs in the hospital, but things can go
missing, and the last thing we want is a doctor who’s passing hospital
drug supplies to addicts. We can’t have that.”

“You’d sack him then?” goaded Mma Ramotswe. “You
wouldn’t try to help him?”

Dr Maketsi laughed.
“We’d sack him good and proper.”

“Good,”
said Mma Ramotswe. “And proper too. Now I have to tell you about my
fee.”

Dr Maketsi’s face fell. “I was worried about
that. This is such a delicate enquiry, I could hardly get the hospital to pay
for it.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded knowingly. “You thought that
as an old friend …”

“Yes,” said Dr Maketsi
quietly. “I thought that as an old friend you might remember how when
your Daddy was so ill at the end …”

Mma Ramotswe did
remember. Dr Maketsi had come unfailingly to the house every evening for three
weeks and eventually had arranged for her Daddy to be put in a private room at
the hospital, all for nothing.

“I remember very well,” she
said. “I only mentioned the fee to tell you that there would be
none.”

SHE HAD all the information she
needed to start her investigation of Dr Komoti. She had his address in Kaunda
Way; she had a photograph, supplied by Dr Maketsi; and she had a note of the
number of the green station wagon which he drove. She had also been given his
telephone number, and the number of his postal box at the Post Office, although
she could not imagine the circumstances in which she might need these. Now all
she had to do was to start to watch Dr Komoti and to learn as much as she could
about him in the shortest possible time.

Dr Maketsi had thoughtfully
provided her with a copy of the duty rota in the casualty department for the
following four months. This meant that Mma Ramotswe would know exactly when he
might be expected to leave the hospital to return home and also when he might
be on night duty. This would save a great deal of time and effort in sitting
waiting in the street in the tiny white van.

She started two days
later. She was there when Dr Komoti drove out of the staff car park at the
hospital that afternoon and she followed him discreetly into town, parking a
few cars away from him and waiting until he was well away from the car park
before she got out of the van. He visited one or two shops and picked up a
newspaper from the Book Centre. Then he returned to his car, drove straight
home, and stayed there—blamelessly, she assumed—until the lights
went out in the house just before ten that evening. It was a dull business
sitting in the tiny white van, but Mma Ramotswe was used to it and never
complained once she had agreed to take on a matter. She would sit in her van
for a whole month, even more, if asked to do so by Dr Maketsi; it was the least
she could do after what he had done for her Daddy.