Alexander Mccall Smith - Ladies' Detective Agency 05 (8 page)

They were both silent for a moment, thinking of the
endless nature of work. It was true, thought Mma Ramotswe, but it was not
something to worry too much about. If it were not true, one might have real
cause to be concerned.

“Tell me more about this Mr
Bobologo,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Is he a kind man?”

Mma
Holonga thought for a moment. “He is kind, I think. I have seen him
smiling at the schoolchildren and he has never spoken roughly to me. I think he
is kind.”

“Then why has he not been married?” asked
Mma Ramotswe. “Or is his wife late?”

“There was a
wife,” said Mma Holonga. “But she died. He did not have time to get
married again, as he was so busy reading. Now he thinks that it is
time.”

Mma Ramotswe looked out of the window. There was something
wrong with this Mr Bobologo; she could sense it. So she wrote on her piece of
paper:
No wife. Reads books. Tall and thin.
She looked up. It would
not take long to deal with Mr Bobologo, she thought; then they could move on to
the second, third, and fourth man. There would be something to worry about with
each of them, she thought pessimistically, but then she corrected herself,
reminding herself that it was no use giving up on a case before one even
started. Clovis Andersen, author of
The Principles of Private
Detection
, would never have countenanced that.
Be confident
, he
wrote—and Mma Ramotswe remembered the very passage—
Everything
can be found out in time. There are very few circumstances in which the true
facts are waiting to be tripped over. And never, ever reach a decision before
you start.

That was very wise advice, and Mma Ramotswe was
determined to follow it. So while Mma Holonga continued to talk about Mr
Bobologo, she deliberately thought of the positive aspects of this man who was
being described to her. And there were many. He was very neat, she heard, and
he did not drink too much. On one occasion, when they had a meal together, he
had made sure that she had the bigger piece of meat and he had taken the
smaller. That was a very good sign, was it not? A man who did that must have
very fine qualities. And of course he was educated, which would mean that he
could teach Mma Holonga things, and improve her outlook on life. All of this
was positive, and yet there was still something wrong, and she could not drive
the suspicion from her mind. Mr Bobologo would have an ulterior motive. Money?
That was the obvious one, but was there something more to it than that?

MMA HOLONGA had just finished talking that morning when
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni arrived at the garage. He was preoccupied with his encounter
with the butcher and he was eager to tell Mma Ramotswe about it. He had heard a
great deal about that other garage, and from time to time he had seen the
results of their fumbling when one of their disgruntled clients had switched to
Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. But those cases were but as nothing compared with
the deliberate fraud—and there really was no other word for
it—which his glance at the engine of the Rover 90 had revealed. This was
dishonesty of a calculated and prolonged variety, all perpetrated against a man
who had trusted them, and, what was perhaps even more shocking, against an
important car that had been placed in their hands. That was a particular and
aggravated wrong: a mechanic had a duty towards machinery, and these ones had
demonstrably failed to discharge that duty. If you were a conscientious
mechanic you would never deliberately subject an engine to stress. Engines had
their dignity—yes, that was the word—and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, as one
of Botswana’s finest mechanics, was not ashamed to use such terms. It was
a question of morality. That was what it was.

As he parked his truck
in its accustomed place—under the acacia tree at the side of the
garage—Mr J.L.B. Matekoni reflected on the sheer effrontery of those
people. He imagined the butcher going into the garage and describing some
problem, and being reassured, when he collected the car, that it had been
attended to. Perhaps they even lied about the difficulties of obtaining parts;
he was sure that they would have charged him for the genuine spare parts, which
they would have had to order from a special dealer in South Africa, or even
England, all that way away. He thought of the factory in England where they
made Rover cars; under a grey sky, with rain, which they had in such abundance
and of which Botswana had so little; and he thought too of those Englishmen,
his brother mechanics, standing over the metal lathes and drills that would
produce those beautiful pieces of machinery. What would they have felt, he
wondered, if they were to know that far away in Botswana there were
unscrupulous mechanics prepared to put all sorts of unsuitable parts into the
engine which they had so lovingly created? What would they think of Botswana if
they knew that? It made him burn with indignation just to contemplate. And he
was sure that Mma Ramotswe would share his outrage when he told her. He had
noticed her reaction to wrongdoing when she heard about it. She would go quiet,
and shake her head, and then she would utter some remark which always expressed
exactly what he was feeling, but in a way which he could never achieve. He was
a man of machinery, of nuts and bolts and engine blocks, not a man of words.
But he appreciated the right words when he heard them, and particularly when
they came from Mma Ramotswe, who, in his mind, spoke for Botswana.

Rather than enter the garage through the workshop, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni went
round to the side, to the door of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
Normally this was kept open, which meant that chickens sometimes wandered in
and annoyed Mma Makutsi by pecking at the floor around her toes, but today it
was closed, which suggested that Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi were out, or that
there was a client inside. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni leaned forward to listen at the
keyhole, to see if he could hear voices within, and at that moment, as he bent
forward, the door was suddenly opened from inside.

Mma Holonga stared
in astonishment at the sight of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, bent almost double. She
half turned to Mma Ramotswe. “There is a man here,” she said.
“There is a man here listening.”

Mma Ramotswe shot Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni a warning glance. “He has hurt his back, I think, Mma.
That is why he is standing like that. And anyway, it’s only Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni, who owns the garage. He is entitled to be standing there. He is quite
harmless.”

Mma Holonga looked again at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who,
feeling that he had to authenticate Mma Ramotswe’s explanation, put a
hand to his back and tried to look uncomfortable.

“I thought that
he was trying to listen to us,” said Mma Holonga. “That’s
what I thought, Mma.”

“No, he would not do that,”
said Mma Ramotswe. “Sometimes men just stand around. I think that is what
he was doing.”

“I see,” said Mma Holonga, making her
way past Mr J.L.B. Matekoni with a sideways glance. “I shall go now, Mma.
But I shall wait to hear from you.”

“Well, well!”
said Mma Ramotswe as they watched Mma Holonga get into her car. “That was
very awkward. What were you doing listening in at the keyhole?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni laughed. “I was not listening. Or I was not
listening, but just trying to hear …” He trailed off. He was not
explaining it well.

“You wanted to see if I was busy,”
prompted Mma Ramotswe. “Is that it?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni
nodded. “That was all I was doing.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled.
“You could always knock and say Ko, Ko. That is how we normally do
things, is it not?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni took the reproach in
silence. He did not wish to argue with Mma Ramotswe over this; he was keen to
tell her about the butcher’s car and he looked eagerly at the tea-pot.
They could sit over a cup of bush tea and he would tell her about the awful
thing that he had discovered quite by chance and she would tell him what to do.
So he made a remark about being thirsty, as it was such a hot day, and Mma
Ramotswe immediately suggested a cup of tea. She could sense that there was
something on his mind and it was surely the function of a wife to listen to her
husband when there was something troubling him. Not that I’m actually a
wife, she told herself; I’m only a fiancée. But even then,
fiancées should listen too, and could give exactly the same sort of
advice as wives gave. So she put on the kettle and they had bush tea together,
sitting in the shade of the acacia tree, beside Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s
parked truck. And in the tree above them, an African grey dove watched them
from its branch, silently, before it flew off in search of the mate which it
had lost.

MMA RAMOTSWE’S reaction to Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni’s story was exactly as he had thought it would be. She was
angry; not angry in the loud way in which some people were angry, but quietly,
with only pursed lips and a particular look in her eye to show what she was
feeling. She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought
threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not
count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they
would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could
trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.
Everything was based on trust, even day-to-day things like crossing the
road—which required trust that the drivers of cars would be paying
attention—to buying the food from a roadside vendor, whom you trusted not
to poison you. It was a lesson that we learned as children, when our parents
threw us up into the sky and thrilled us by letting us drop into their waiting
arms. We trusted those arms to be there, and they were.

Mma Ramotswe
was silent for a while after Mr J.L.B. Matekoni finished speaking. “I
know that garage,” she said. “A long time ago, when I first had my
white van, I used to go there. That was before I started coming to Tlokweng
Road Speedy Motors of course.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni listened
intently. This explained the state of the tiny white van when he had first seen
it. He had assumed that the worn brake pads and the loose clutch were the
results of neglect by Mma Ramotswe herself, rather than a consequence of the
van having been looked after—if one could call it that—by First
Class Motors, as it had the temerity to call itself. The thought made his heart
skip a beat; it would have been so very easy for Mma Ramotswe to have had an
accident as a result of her faulty brakes, and if that had happened he might
never have met her and he would never have been what he was today—the
fiancé of one of the finest women in Botswana. But he recognised that
there was no point in entertaining such thoughts. History was littered with
events that had changed everything and might easily not have done so. Imagine
if the British had given in to South African pressure and had agreed to make
what was then the Bechuanaland Protectorate into part of the Cape Province.
They might easily have done that, and then there would be no Botswana today,
and that would have been a loss for everybody. And his people would have
suffered so much too if that had happened; all those years of suffering which
others had borne but which they had been spared; and all that had stood between
them and that was the decision of some politician somewhere who may never even
have visited the Protectorate, or cared very much. And then, of course, there
was Mr Churchill, whom Mr J.L.B. Matekoni admired greatly, although he had been
no more than a small boy when Mr Churchill had died. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had
read in one of Mma Makutsi’s magazines that Mr Churchill had almost been
run over by a car when he was visiting America as a young man. If he had been
standing six inches further into the road when the car hit him he would not
have survived, and that would have made history very different, or so the
article suggested. And then there was President Kennedy, who might have leaned
forward just at the moment when that trigger was pulled, and might have lived
to change history even more than he had already done. But Mr Churchill had
survived, as had Mma Ramotswe, and that was the important thing. Now the tiny
white van was scrupulously maintained, with its tight clutch and its responsive
brakes. And Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had fitted a new, extra-large seat belt in the
front, so that Mma Ramotswe could strap herself in without feeling
uncomfortable. She was safe, which was what he wanted above all else; it would
be unthinkable for anything to happen to Mma Ramotswe.

“You will
have to do something about this,” said Mma Ramotswe suddenly. “You
cannot leave it be.”

“Of course not,” said Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni. “I have told the butcher to bring the car round here next week,
and I shall start to fix it for him. I shall have to order special parts, but I
think I know where I can find them. There is a man in Mafikeng who knows all
about these old cars and the parts they need. I shall ask him.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. “That will be a kind thing to do,” she
said. “But I was really thinking that you would have to do something
about First Class Motors. They are the ones who have been cheating him. And
they will be cheating others.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked
thoughtful. “But I don’t know what I can do about them,” he
said. “You can’t make good mechanics out of bad ones. You cannot
teach a hyena to dance.”

“Hyenas have nothing to do with
it,” said Mma Ramotswe firmly. “But jackals do. Those men in that
garage are jackals. You will have to stop them.”

Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni felt alarmed. Mma Ramotswe was right about those mechanics, but he
really did not see what he could do to stop them. There was no Chamber of
Mechanics to which he could complain (Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had often thought that
a Chamber of Mechanics would have been a good idea), and he had no proof that
they had committed a crime. He would never be able to convince the police that
fraud had been perpetrated because there would be no proof of what they had
said to the butcher. They could argue that they had told him all along that
they would have to put in substitute parts, and there would be many other
mechanics who could go into court and testify that this was a reasonable thing
for any mechanic to do in the circumstances. And if there were no help from the
police, then Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would have to speak to the manager of First
Class Motors, and he did not relish the prospect of that. This man had an
unpleasant look on his face and was known to be something of a bully. He would
not stand for allegations being made by somebody like Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and
the situation could rapidly turn threatening. It was all very well, then, for
Mma Ramotswe to tell him to go and deal with the dishonest garage, but she did
not understand that one could not police the motor trade single-handed.