Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (15 page)

The thorn trees stood clear in the sharp light of
morning, and there were birds upon them, and in flight—hoopoes, louries,
and tiny birds which she could not name. Here and there cattle stood at the
fence which followed the road for mile upon mile. They raised their heads and
stared, or ambled slowly on, tugging at the tufts of dry grass that clung
tenaciously to the hardened earth.

This was a dry land. Just a short
distance to the west lay the Kalahari, a hinterland of ochre that stretched
off, for unimaginable miles, to the singing emptinesses of the Namib. If she
turned her tiny white van off on one of the tracks that struck off from the
main road, she could drive for perhaps thirty or forty miles before her wheels
would begin to sink into the sand and spin hopelessly. The vegetation would
slowly become sparser, more desert-like. The thorn trees would thin out and
there would be ridges of thin earth, through which the omnipresent sand would
surface and crenellate. There would be patches of bareness, and scattered grey
rocks, and there would be no sign of human activity. To live with this great
dry interior, brown and hard, was the lot of the Batswana, and it was this that
made them cautious, and careful in their husbandry.

If you went there,
out into the Kalahari, you might hear lions by night. For the lions were there
still, on these wide landscapes, and they made their presence known in the
darkness, in coughing grunts and growls. She had been there once as a young
woman, when she had gone with her friend to visit a remote cattle post. It was
as far into the Kalahari as cattle could go, and she had felt the utter
loneliness of a place without people. This was Botswana distilled; the essence
of her country.

It was the rainy season, and the land was covered with
green. Rain could transform it so quickly, and had done so; now the ground was
covered with shoots of sweet new grass, Namaqualand daisies, the vines of Tsama
melons, and aloes with stalk flowers of red and yellow.

They had made a
fire at night, just outside the crude huts which served as shelter at the
cattle post, but the light from the fire seemed so tiny under the great empty
night sky with its dipping constellations. She had huddled close to her friend,
who had told her that she should not be frightened, because lions would keep
away from fires, as would supernatural beings,
tokoloshes
and the
like.

She awoke in the small hours of the morning, and the fire was
low. She could make out its embers through the spaces between the branches that
made up the wall of the hut. Somewhere, far away, there was a grunting sound,
but she was not afraid, and she walked out of the hut to stand underneath the
sky and draw the dry, clear air into her lungs. And she thought: I am just a
tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit
down on this earth and touch it and call it their own. She waited for another
thought to come, but none did, and so she crept back into the hut and the
warmth of the blankets on her sleeping mat.

Now, driving the tiny white
van along those rolling miles, she thought that one day she might go back into
the Kalahari, into those empty spaces, those wide grasslands that broke and
broke the heart.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BIG CAR GUILT

I
T WAS three days after the
satisfactory resolution of the Patel case. Mma Ramotswe had put in her bill for
two thousand pula, plus expenses, and had been paid by return of post. This
astonished her. She could not believe that she would be paid such a sum without
protest, and the readiness, and apparent cheerfulness with which Mr Patel had
settled the bill induced pangs of guilt over the sheer size of the fee.

It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she
thought, while others had none. Some people would agonise over minor slips or
mistakes on their part, while others would feel quite unmoved by their own
gross acts of betrayal or dishonesty. Mma Pekwane fell into the former
category, thought Mma Ramotswe. Note Mokoti fell into the latter.

Mma
Pekwane had seemed anxious when she had come into the office of the No. 1
Ladies’ Detective Agency. Mma Ramotswe had given her a strong cup of bush
tea, as she always did with nervous clients, and had waited for her to be ready
to speak. She was anxious about a man, she thought; there were all the signs.
What would it be? Some piece of masculine bad behaviour, of course, but
what?

“I’m worried that my husband has done a dreadful
thing,” said Mma Pekwane eventually. “I feel very ashamed for
him.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded her head gently. Masculine bad
behaviour.

“Men do terrible things,” she said. “All
wives are worried about their husbands. You are not alone.”

Mma
Pekwane sighed. “But my husband has done a terrible thing,” she
said. “A very terrible thing.”

Mma Ramotswe stiffened. If
Rra Pekwane had killed somebody she would have to make it quite clear that the
police should be called in. She would never dream of helping anybody conceal a
murderer.

“What is this terrible thing?” she asked.

Mma Pekwane lowered her voice. “He has a stolen car.”

Mma Ramotswe was relieved. Car theft was rife, almost unremarkable, and
there must be many women driving around the town in their husbands’
stolen cars. Mma Ramotswe could never imagine herself doing that, of course,
and nor, it seemed, could Mma Pekwane.

“Did he tell you
it’s stolen?” she asked. “Are you sure of it?”

Mma Pekwane shook her head. “He said a man gave it to him. He said
that this man had two Mercedes-Benzes and only needed one.”

Mma
Ramotswe laughed. “Do men really think they can fool us that
easily?” she said. “Do they think we’re fools?”

“I think they do,” said Mma Pekwane.

Mma Ramotswe
picked up her pencil and drew several lines on her blotter. Looking at the
scribbles, she saw that she had drawn a car.

She looked at Mma Pekwane.
“Do you want me to tell you what to do?” she asked. “Is that
what you want?”

Mma Pekwane looked thoughtful. “No,”
she replied. “I don’t want that. I’ve decided what I want to
do.”

“And that is?”

“I want to give
the car back. I want to give it back to its owner.”

Mma Ramotswe
sat up straight. “You want to go to the police then? You want to inform
on your husband?”

“No. I don’t want to do that. I
just want the car to get back to its owner without the police knowing. I want
the Lord to know that the car’s back where it belongs.”

Mma
Ramotswe stared at her client. It was, she had to admit, a perfectly reasonable
thing to want. If the car were to be returned to the owner, then Mma
Pekwane’s conscience would be clear, and she would still have her
husband. On mature reflection, it seemed to Mma Ramotswe to be a very good way
of dealing with a difficult situation.

“But why come to me about
this?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “How can I help?”

Mma
Pekwane gave her answer without hesitation.

“I want you to find
out who owns that car,” she said. “Then I want you to steal it from
my husband and give it back to the rightful owner. That’s all I want you
to do.”

LATER THAT evening, as she
drove home in her little white van, Mma Ramotswe thought that she should never
have agreed to help Mma Pekwane; but she had, and now she was committed. Yet it
was not going to be a simple matter—unless, of course, one went to the
police, which she clearly could not do. It may be that Rra Pekwane deserved to
be handed over, but her client had asked that this should not happen, and her
first loyalty was to the client. So some other way would have to be
found.

That evening, after her supper of chicken and pumpkin, Mma
Ramotswe telephoned Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

“Where do stolen
Mercedes-Benzes come from?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

“From over
the border,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “They steal them in South
Africa, bring them over here, respray them, file off the original engine
number, and then sell them cheaply or send them up to Zambia. I know who does
all this, by the way. We all know.”

“I don’t need to
know that,” said Mma Ramotswe. “What I need to know is how you
identify them after all this has happened.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni
paused. “You have to know where to look,” he said.
“There’s usually another serial number somewhere—on the
chassis—or under the bonnet. You can usually find it if you know what
you’re doing.”

“You know what you’re
doing,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Can you help me?”

Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni sighed. He did not like stolen cars. He preferred to have
nothing to do with them, but this was a request from Mma Ramotswe, and so there
was only one answer to give.

“Tell me where and when,” he
said.

THEY
ENTERED the Pekwane garden the following evening, by arrangement with Mma
Pekwane, who had promised that at the agreed time she would make sure that the
dogs were inside and her husband would be busy eating a special meal she would
prepare for him. So there was nothing to stop Mr J.L.B. Matekoni from wriggling
under the Mercedes-Benz parked in the yard and flashing his torch up into the
bodywork. Mma Ramotswe offered to go under the car as well, but Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni doubted whether she would fit and declined her offer. Ten minutes
later, he had a serial number written on a piece of paper and the two of them
slipped out of the Pekwane yard and made their way to the small white van
parked down the road.

“Are you sure that’s all I’ll
need?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “Will they know from that?”

“Yes,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “They’ll
know.”

She dropped him off outside his gate and he waved goodbye
in the darkness. She would be able to repay him soon, she knew.

THAT WEEKEND, Mma Ramotswe drove her tiny white
van over the border to Mafikeng and went straight to the Railway Café.
She bought a copy of the
Johannesburg Star
and sat at a table near the
window reading the news. It was all bad, she decided, and so she laid the paper
to one side and passed the time by looking at her fellow customers.

“Mma Ramotswe!”

She looked up. There he was, the same
old Billy Pilani, older now, of course, but otherwise the same. She could just
see him at the Mochudi Government School, sitting at his desk, dreaming.

She bought him a cup of coffee and a large doughnut and explained to him
what she needed.

“I want you to find out who owns this
car,” she said, passing the slip of paper with the serial number written
on it in the handwriting of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “Then, when you’ve
found out, I want you to tell the owner, or the insurance company, or whoever,
that they can come up to Gaborone and they will find their car ready for them
in an agreed place. All they have to do is to bring South African number plates
with the original number on them. Then they can drive the car home.”

Billy Pilani looked surprised.

“All for nothing?” he
asked. “Nothing to be paid?”

“Nothing,” said
Mma Ramotswe. “It’s just a question of returning property to its
rightful owner. That’s all. You believe in that, don’t you
Billy?”

“Of course,” said Billy Pilani quickly.
“Of course.”

“And Billy I want you to forget
you’re a policeman while all this is going on. There’s not going to
be any arrest for you.”

“Not even a small one?” asked
Billy in a disappointed tone.

“Not even that.”

BILLY PILANI telephoned the following day.

“I’ve got the details from our list of stolen vehicles,”
he said. “I’ve spoken to the insurance company, who’ve
already paid out. So they’d be very happy to get the car back. They can
send one of their men over the border to pick it up.”

“Good,” said Mma Ramotswe. “They are to be in the African
Mall in Gaborone at seven o’clock in the morning next Tuesday, with the
number plates.”

Everything was agreed, and at five o’clock
on the Tuesday morning, Mma Ramotswe crept into the yard of the Pekwane house
and found, as she had been expecting, the keys of the Mercedes-Benz lying on
the ground outside the bedroom window, where Mma Pekwane had tossed them the
previous night. She had been assured by Mma Pekwane that her husband was a
sound sleeper and that he never woke up until Radio Botswana broadcast the
sound of cowbells at six.

He did not hear her start the car and drive
out onto the road, and indeed it was not until almost eight o’clock that
he noticed that his Mercedes-Benz was stolen.

“Call the
police,” shouted Mma Pekwane. “Quick, call the police!”

She noticed that her husband was hesitating.

“Maybe
later,” he said. “In the meantime, I think I shall look for it
myself.”

She looked him directly in the eye, and for a moment she
saw him flinch. He’s guilty, she thought. I was right all along. Of
course he can’t go to the police and tell them that his stolen car has
been stolen.

She saw Mma Ramotswe later that day and thanked her.

“You’ve made me feel much better,” she said. “I
shall now be able to sleep at night without feeling guilty for my
husband.”

“I’m very pleased,” said Mma
Ramotswe. “And maybe he’s learned a lesson too. A very interesting
lesson.”

“What would that be?” asked Mma
Pekwane.

“That lightning always strikes in the same place
twice,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Whatever people say to the
contrary.”

CHAPTER
TWELVE

MMA RAMOTSWE’S HOUSE IN
ZEBRA DRIVE

T
HE HOUSE had been built in 1968, when the town inched out from the
shops and the Government Buildings. It was on a corner site, which was not
always a good thing, as people would sometimes stand on that corner, under the
thorn trees that grew there, and spit into her garden, or throw their rubbish
over her fence. At first, when she saw them doing that, she would shout from
the window, or bang a dustbin lid at them, but they seemed to have no shame,
these people, and they just laughed. So she gave up, and the young man who did
her garden for her every third day would just pick up the rubbish and put it
away. That was the only problem with that house. For the rest, Mma Ramotswe was
fiercely proud of it, and daily reflected on her good fortune in being able to
buy it when she did, just before house prices went so high that honest people
could no longer pay them.

The yard was a large one, almost
two-thirds of an acre, and it was well endowed with trees and shrubs. The trees
were nothing special—thorn trees for the most part—but they gave
good shade, and they never died if the rains were bad. Then there were the
purple bougainvillaeas which had been enthusiastically planted by the previous
owners, and which had almost taken over by the time Mma Ramotswe came. She had
to cut these back, to give space for her pawpaws and her pumpkins.

At
the front of the house there was a verandah, which was her favourite place, and
which was where she liked to sit in the mornings, when the sun rose, or in the
evenings, before the mosquitoes came out. She had extended it by placing an
awning of shade netting supported by rough-hewn poles. This filtered out many
of the rays of the sun and allowed plants to grow in the green light it
created. There she had elephant-ear and ferns, which she watered daily, and
which made a lush patch of green against the brown earth.