Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (11 page)

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.

“Mma
Ramotswe!”

She stood where she was, frozen in terror. There was
somebody in the yard, watching her. Somebody had whispered her name.

She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came. And it would be dangerous
to speak, anyway. So she backed away, slowly, inch by inch, towards the kitchen
door. Once inside, she slammed the door shut behind her and reached for the
lock. As she turned the key the electricity came on and the kitchen was flooded
with light. The fridge started to purr; a light from the cooker winked on and
off at her: 3:04; 3:04

CHAPTER
NINE

THE BOYFRIEND

T
HERE WERE three quite
exceptional houses in the country, and Mma Ramotswe felt some satisfaction that
she had been invited to two of them. The best-known of these was Mokolodi, a
rambling chateau-like building placed in the middle of the bush to the south of
Gaborone. This house, which had a gatehouse with gates on which hornbills had
been worked in iron, was probably the grandest establishment in the country,
and was certainly rather more impressive than Phakadi House, to the north,
which was rather too close to the sewage ponds for Mma Ramotswe’s taste.
This had its compensations, though, as the sewage ponds attracted a great
variety of bird life, and from the verandah of Phakadi one could watch flights
of flamingos landing on the murky green water. But you could not do this if the
wind was in the wrong direction, which it often was.

The third house
could only be suspected of being a house of distinction, as very few people
were invited to enter it, and Gaborone as a whole had to rely on what could be
seen of the house from the outside—which was not much, as it was
surrounded by a high white wall—or on reports from those who were
summoned into the house for some special purpose. These reports were unanimous
in their praise for the sheer opulence of the interior.

“Like
Buckingham Palace,” said one woman who had been called to arrange flowers
for some family occasion. “Only rather better. I think that the Queen
lives a bit more simply than those people in there.”

The people
in question were the family of Mr Paliwalar Sundigar Patel, the owner of eight
stores—five in Gaborone and three in Francistown—a hotel in Orapa,
and a large outfitters in Lobatse. He was undoubtedly one of the wealthiest men
in the country, if not the wealthiest, but amongst the Batswana this counted
for little, as none of the money had gone into cattle, and money which was not
invested in cattle, as everybody knew, was but dust in the mouth.

Mr
Paliwalar Patel had come to Botswana in 1967, at the age of twenty-five. He had
not had a great deal in his pocket then, but his father, a trader in a remote
part of Zululand, had advanced him the money to buy his first shop in the
African Mall. This had been a great success; Mr Patel bought goods for
virtually nothing from traders in distress and then sold them on at minimal
profit. Trade blossomed and shop was added to shop, all of them run on the same
commercial philosophy. By his fiftieth birthday, he stopped expanding his
empire, and concentrated on the improvement and education of his family.

There were four children—a son, Wallace, twin daughters, Sandri and
Pali, and the youngest, a daughter called Nandira. Wallace had been sent to an
expensive boarding school in Zimbabwe, in order to satisfy Mr Patel’s
ambition that he become a gentleman. There he had learned to play cricket, and
to be cruel. He had been admitted to dental school, after a large donation by
Mr Patel, and had then returned to Durban, where he set up a practice in
cosmetic dentistry. At some point he had shortened his name—”for
convenience’s sake”—and had become Mr Wallace Pate BDS
(Natal).

Mr Patel had protested at the change. “Why are you now
this Mr Wallace Pate BDS (Natal) may I ask? Why? You ashamed, or something? You
think I’m just a Mr Paliwalar Patel BA (Failed) or something?”

The son had tried to placate his father.

“Short names are
easier, father. Pate, Patel—it’s the same thing. So why have an
extra letter at the end? The modern idea is to be brief. We must be modern
these days. Everything is modern, even names.”

There had been no
such pretensions from the twins. They had both been sent back to the Natal to
meet husbands, which they had done in the manner expected by their father. Both
sons-in-law had now been taken into the business and were proving to have good
heads for figures and a sound understanding of the importance of tight profit
margins.

Then there was Nandira, who was sixteen at the time and a
pupil at Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, the best and most expensive school in
the country. She was bright academically, was consistently given glowing
reports from the school, and was expected to make a good marriage in the
fullness of time—probably on her twentieth birthday, which Mr Patel had
felt was precisely the right time for a girl to marry.

The entire
family, including the sons-in-law, the grandparents, and several distant
cousins, lived in the Patel mansion near the old Botswana Defence Force Club.
There had been several houses on the plot, old colonial-style houses with wide
verandahs and fly screens, but Mr Patel had knocked them down and built his new
house from scratch. In fact, it was several houses linked together, all forming
the family compound.

“We Indians like to live in a
compound,” Mr Patel had explained to the architect. “We like to be
able to see what’s going on in the family, you know.”

The
architect, who was given a free rein, designed a house in which he indulged
every architectural whimsy which more demanding and less well-funded clients
had suppressed over the years. To his astonishment, Mr Patel accepted
everything, and the resulting building proved to be much to his taste. It was
furnished in what could only be called Delhi Rococo, with a great deal of gilt
in furniture and curtains, and on the walls expensive pictures of Hindu saints
and mountain deer with eyes that followed one about the room.

When the
twins married, at an expensive ceremony in Durban to which over fifteen hundred
guests were invited, they were each given their own quarters, the house having
been considerably expanded for the purpose. The sons-in-law were also each
given a red Mercedes-Benz, with their initials on the driver’s door. This
required the Patel garage to be expanded as well, as there were now four
Mercedes-Benz cars to be housed there; Mr Patel’s, Mrs Patel’s car
(driven by a driver), and the two belonging to the sons-in law.