The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘I have seen you,’ said Mma Makutsi from the other side of the office. ‘I have seen you going into your office in town. You are a lawyer.’

  Mma Sheba half-turned to reply. ‘You’re very observant, Mma. But I suppose that is what comes with being a detective. You have to notice things in your job.’

  ‘And in your job too, Mma,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘When you’re reading through papers, you must always be looking for things that shouldn’t be there.’

  Mma Sheba laughed. ‘Yes, you must. People will try to put things into contracts in the hope that the other side won’t see them. We have to be on our toes.’

  ‘So, Mma…’ prompted Mma Ramotswe.

  ‘Let me tell you a little about myself,’ said Mma Sheba. ‘Then you will feel that you know me better. And then…’ She paused, with the air of one about to reveal an important secret. ‘Then I shall tell you about why I have come to see you.’

  ‘As you know, Mma,’ said Mma Sheba, ‘I am an attorney. My office – the one that your assistant —’

  ‘Associate detective,’ interrupted Mma Makutsi.

  ‘That your associate detective mentioned. I have two partners in the firm, Mma. One of them is a woman, and one is a man. We all get on very well together and we have different areas of speciality. I am the one who does trusts and executories: I look after people’s wills and estates after their death. We are quite busy these days, not because more people are becoming late but because there is more money in the country. The more money you have, then the more money there is in your estate after your death. I have one assistant, who is newly qualified, and I might even need to get another one before too long.’

  ‘You are fortunate that your business is doing so well,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Not everybody is in that position these days.’

  ‘Indeed they are not,’ said Mma Sheba. ‘One of my partners handles insolvencies. He’s very busy these days.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘People who have built up a good business over the years, who have worked hard all their lives, suddenly find that the economic climate is very different.’

  ‘It is very sad for them,’ said Mma Ramotswe.

  Mma Makutsi had now made the tea and brought two mugs that she placed before Mma Ramotswe and Mma Sheba. ‘These are both redbush,’ she said. ‘I shall be drinking ordinary tea myself.’

  Mma Sheba thanked her, and Mma Ramotswe was pleased to see that some of Mma Makutsi’s prickliness disappeared.

  Mma Sheba continued with her tale. ‘I drew up a will about four years ago,’ she said. ‘It was for a man who had been a client of my firm for some time – a farmer called Rra Molapo.’

  ‘I know that family,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Or rather, I know of them. Was his father not one of Seretse Khama’s ministers?’

  Mma Sheba nodded. ‘Yes, he was in the government then. The Khamas and the Molapos were good friends, but I think the old man – that’s the father of my client – became a bit bored with politics and so he bought a farm down on the other side of the Gaborone Dam. It was quite a good farm, and of course land was cheaper in those days. He was a skilled farmer, and the land was in good order when my client, that’s Edgar Molapo, took over. The old man died and Rra Edgar took on the running of the farm. He did quite well: he won prizes for his Brahman bulls and I think they even used some of them for breeding on the other side of the border. He made a fair amount of money out of cattle.’

  Mma Ramotswe thought of her own father, Obed Ramotswe, whom she referred to as her ‘late daddy’. Whenever anybody mentioned cattle, memories of him came back to her, and she was at his side again, at the cattle post, admiring the herd that he had built up through being able to judge them so well. She heard their lowing, and she smelled the sweet smell that always hung in the air above them – the smell of forage and dust, the smell of their hides when wet, the very smell of her country.

  ‘There is nothing like a good herd of cattle,’ she mused.

  Mma Sheba agreed. ‘No, there is nothing, Mma. And Rra Edgar was a happy man, I think. Except for one thing – he did not have any children of his own.’

  Mma Ramotswe held Mma Sheba’s gaze. And that is me too, she thought, although she had Motholeli and Puso, and she was grateful, and she loved them.

  ‘So when he became ill and knew that his days were not going to be very long, he came to see me. His wife had died a few years back and the nearest relative was his sister. There had been three of them in the family – Rra Edgar, this sister, and a brother who had gone to Swaziland and had married a Swazi woman. He ran a hotel in the Ezulweni Valley and never came back to Botswana. He and Rra Edgar had fallen out with one another and did not speak. He was killed in a car crash over in Swaziland – you know what their roads are like – and then, of course, it was too late for any reconciliation. I think that Rra Edgar regretted this and he got his sister to arrange with his brother’s widow, the Swazi woman, to send over his nephew, whom he had never met. He wanted this boy to come and stay on the farm during his school holidays, and that is what happened. Rra Edgar doted on him, as childless uncles can do. He picked up Setswana and became quite fluent in the language. Eventually he was just like a Motswana born and bred – you would never have known that he had been born in Swaziland.

  ‘The sister stayed on the farm. Rra Edgar built her a small house, and she settled in that. She had been married, but her husband had gone off with some bar girl from Francistown and that was it. They had no children, as the marriage had not lasted very long.’

  Mma Makutsi had returned to her desk by now, but was listening avidly. Now she intervened.

  ‘Men are always doing these things,’ she said. ‘Going off.’

  ‘That is true,’ said Mma Sheba.

  They waited for Mma Makutsi to say something else, but she did not.

  ‘About six months ago,’ said Mma Sheba, ‘Rra Edgar died. He dropped dead very suddenly and they found, when they opened him up, that his heart was not very good. They said that it was something of a miracle that he had lasted as long as he did – fifty-four years, Mma Ramotswe.’

  ‘It is very early to become late,’ said Mma Ramotswe. Obed Ramotswe had been only a year or two older, and she thought of all the years that her own father had missed. But then he had been a miner, and it was the dust that killed miners. It lined the lungs, so they said, and that lining turned, in due course, to rock.

  ‘He had asked me to draw up a will,’ Mma Sheba went on. ‘I had done it and now I had to put the will into effect. There were one or two small legacies: one to the government school in his village, another to Camp Hill, and a small amount to his sister, who was living on the farm when he died. The main asset, though, was the farm.’

  ‘That would have been worth a lot,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘And then there would have been the cattle. You must not forget the cattle.’ It was her father’s cattle that had made it possible to open the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Behind so many things in Botswana there lay cattle – it had always been like that.

  ‘The cattle were very valuable,’ said Mma Sheba. ‘They went with the farm. The will said: “the farm and all its stock and equipment”.’

  Mma Ramotswe thought she knew who got those. ‘The nephew?’

  Mma Sheba nodded. Behind her, seated at her desk, Mma Makutsi was silent.

  ‘But…’ Mma Sheba looked down at her hands.

  ‘Yes, Mma?’

  ‘But I’m not sure that the right person will get them.’

  They waited.

  ‘You haven’t found the nephew?’ asked Mma Ramotswe.

  ‘I fear that is true, Mma,’ said Mma Sheba. ‘You see, what has happened is that a young man has stepped forward. He has come into my office and has claimed to be the nephew. He has shown me his birth certificate and his passport too. They both say he is Liso Molapo.’

  Mma Ramotswe drew in her breath. ‘But he isn’t?’

  Mma Sheba spread her hands in a gesture of uncertainty. ‘How can I tell?’


  Mma Makutsi could not contain herself. ‘Surely the sister – Rra Edgar’s sister – would know him? She’s his aunt, after all. An aunt knows her nephew, I think.’

  Mma Sheba turned round to address Mma Makutsi. ‘Yes, an aunt should know her own nephew. And this aunt has said that this young man is who he is. The boy’s father, of course, is late and I have been unable to track down the Swazi woman who is the mother of this boy. I have tried, but she seems to have left the country some years ago. The boy himself says that his mother went off when he was fourteen and that he had been looked after by a friend of his late father’s. So there is no family for me to speak to – apart from his aunt, Rra Edgar’s sister.’

  Mma Ramotswe considered this. She sketched a brief family tree out on a piece of paper in front of her: Rra Edgar, deceased brother, sister and nephew. It was not complicated. ‘If she says he is who he claims to be and if he has documents to prove it, then what is the problem, Mma?’

  Mma Sheba turned back. ‘You want to know something, Mma Ramotswe? I have a nose for a lie. I’ve always had it. I think that this young man is lying. I think he is not who he claims to be.’ She paused. ‘I feel it in my bones, Mma.’

  ‘Bones never lie,’ said Mma Makutsi.

  ‘No,’ said Mma Sheba. ‘Mine never have. Why would they start now?’

  Mma Ramotswe noted what had been said about intuition and bones. She knew what Mma Sheba meant – she herself regularly used her intuition – but she was a detective and Mma Sheba was a lawyer. Lawyers were not meant to follow their noses, to rely on hunches and so on. Lawyers were meant to look at the evidence and weigh it carefully. That was how they were meant to work.

  ‘Exactly what do you want me to do, Mma?’ she asked.

  The lawyer looked at her intently. ‘I want you to prove that this young man is an imposter. That is what I want. I want you to find out just who he is.’

  Again this struck Mma Ramotswe as a strange thing for a lawyer to say. Lawyers should not make up their mind in advance of a full understanding of the facts. It seemed that Mma Sheba had decided what she wanted the outcome to be. It was very strange, but just as there could be strange detectives, and strange mechanics for that matter, presumably there could be strange lawyers too.

  ‘I shall do my best to investigate the situation, Mma,’ she said. ‘I shall try to establish the truth.’

  ‘That is what we always do,’ echoed Mma Makutsi. ‘We establish the truth. That is our business, you see.’

  Chapter Three

  Snakes Are Very Shy

  The house that Phuti Radiphuti and Grace Makutsi had built for themselves stood on a plot of land cleared from the bush at the edge of town. The land had been a haven for snakes and there were still a few who had survived its clearing. This came home to them when, two days after they had moved in, a cobra was discovered behind the washing basket in the bathroom, to be removed, hissing in anger, at the end of a long pole left behind by the builders. Grace would have preferred it had Phuti despatched the snake altogether with blows from the pole, but he did not believe in killing snakes.

  ‘If we killed all the snakes in Botswana,’ he pointed out, ‘then we would be in serious trouble with rats. We would end up asking the snakes to come back.’

  ‘I do not want all the snakes in the country killed,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘I want those in my garden, and now in my house, to be got rid of. That is all, Rra.’

  ‘I am getting rid of him,’ said Phuti.

  This did not impress her. ‘But he will come back. That snake is thinking: this man is putting me out, but I have my own ideas on that. I shall return when his back is turned and I shall find that nice cool place in the bathroom once more. And if he comes in again, I shall bite him to remind him that I am a cobra and we do not like being poked with sticks.’

  ‘He will not come back,’ said Phuti mildly. ‘Snakes are very shy, Mma. They do not like to come into contact with people.’

  ‘Then why do they move into our houses?’ challenged Mma Makutsi, righteously. A cousin of hers up in Bobonong had been bitten by a puff adder, in the house itself, and had lost a leg as a result. She knew about these things.

  Phuti had sighed and said something that she did not quite catch – something about conservation and respect for nature. But even if there were the occasional snake, neither of them felt anything but pride over their new house. For Mma Makutsi, in particular, it was an almost unimaginable leap from her modest quarters in Extension Two, where she had had what amounted to one and a half rooms, and water had to be fetched from an outside tap. Now she had a bathroom that she could only have dreamed of in the past – one with gleaming white tiles, and hot and cold running water, and a bath that would accommodate even Mma Ramotswe, or some other traditionally built person, with plenty of room left over. That was her greatest, most unimaginable luxury, and it would take more than the odd cobra to take the shine off that.

  That day, after the visit of Mma Sheba to the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mma Makutsi returned from work early. She explained to Mma Ramotswe that she was feeling tired, having been up late the previous night, and Mma Ramotswe had suggested that she go home to take a rest.

  The house was quiet when she returned. Phuti sometimes worked from home in the afternoons, as he had found that he could do paperwork more efficiently without the disturbances that dogged him in the shop, but that afternoon he had meetings with suppliers and had said he would not be back until after six. The maid who had looked after him at his parents’ home had been transferred to work in their new home, but it was a Thursday and that was her day off. So Mma Makutsi came home to a house in which the most noticeable sound was the creaking of the roof as it contracted with the dissipation of the day’s heat. There were other sounds, though, and these were the sounds that can be heard in every house if one has the time to listen: the sighing of the wind under the door; the rattle of leaves against a pane of glass; the faint rhythm of a dripping tap. These may be sensed before they are heard, half-registered in the mind before they are recognised.

  She decided to lie down. The doctor had told her that she might find herself feeling suddenly exhausted and she should not fight this. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘that your body tells you things.’

  She went into their bedroom and kicked off her shoes. Then, lying down on the king-size bed that Phuti had specially ordered through his wholesaler, she closed her eyes and prepared to give in to her drowsiness. But sleep eluded her and she found herself listening to those small sounds, wondering which one of them might be a cobra. It was a hot day, and any cobra who knew anything about houses would realise that there would be plenty of cool places that offered sanctuary from the heat outside – places of darkness where a snake could lie and digest his meal and think about his next move. Places in bathrooms, places in cupboards, places under beds…

  She opened her eyes. There was a movement on the ceiling above her – a movement that was almost undetectable because the creature that made it was so small. She saw what it was: a tiny gecko, attached to the ceiling by the curious sticky pads on its toes, had been stalking a fly and had pounced. She smiled. There was no reason to be frightened of creatures like that, which helped so much by keeping mosquitoes down.

  Then she heard another sound. At first she wondered whether somebody had come into the house and was talking at the end of the corridor, but then, hearing it again, and louder now, she realised that it was in the room.

  I’d be careful if I were you, boss.

  She lay quite still. She had been wearing relatively new shoes and this pair had never addressed her before. But the voice was the same – and spoke with much the same accent as her other, older shoes.

  ‘What was that?’ she half-whispered.

  I’d be careful, boss – that’s all.

  She sat up and rubbed her eyes. This was ridiculous. Shoes could not talk – as Mma Ramotswe would say, that is well known – and yet there was no doubt in her mind that
she had heard something. She considered what they had said. I’d be careful, boss. What could it mean? In the past her shoes had restricted themselves to complaints or to Delphic utterances of no great importance – the sort of thing heard from subservient, disgruntled employees. This was the first time they had uttered a distinct warning.

  She told herself that it was all in her mind. People imagined that they heard things, but it was just one bit of the brain convincing another bit of the brain that something had been said.

  Don’t say we didn’t warn you, boss – that’s all. But remember this: we can see things down here that you can’t see up there.

  Now Mma Makutsi was wide awake, and trying to make sense of what the shoes had said. What could they see that she could not? She shifted slightly so as to be able to look over the edge of the bed. Her shoes were there where she had slipped out of them, their toes pointed towards the bed. We can see things down here that you can’t see up there…

  Mma Makutsi gasped. She was enough of a detective to work out that if – and it was an unlikely if – the shoes could see things that she could not, then, given the direction they were pointing in, whatever they were looking at would be under the bed. The thought brought a momentary surge of fear, but she made a conscious effort to control herself. You could make up all sorts of fears and then you would end up being too frightened to do anything. You had to be careful not to imagine things that were simply not there.

  She took a deep breath and began to move her legs out over the edge of the bed.

  Don’t say we didn’t tell you, boss!

  She stopped, and looked down at the shoes. This was ridiculous. This was the sort of behaviour that ended in your being carted off to the special hospital in Lobatse. She completed the manoeuvre and stood up beside the bed. Then, decisively and deliberately, she slipped into her shoes. It crossed her mind that she should check them first to see that no scorpions had crept in – that had been known to happen – but now it was too late, and there was no sharp pain from a sting. No, it was all a matter of an overactive imagination, something to do with being pregnant perhaps.