Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “And?”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sat down and stared at his hands.

  “I was called to pull the car out of the ditch. I took my rescue truck and we winched it up. Then we towed it back here and left it round the back. I’ll show it to you later.”

  He paused for a moment before continuing. The story seemed simple enough, but it appeared to be costing him a considerable effort to tell it.

  “I looked it over. It was a panel-beating job and I could easily get my panel-beater to take it off to his workshop and sort it out. But there were one or two things I would have to do first. I had to check the electrics, for a start. These new expensive cars have so much wiring that a little knock here or there can make everything go wrong. You won’t be able to lock your doors if the wires are nicked. Or your antitheft devices will freeze everything solid. It’s very complicated, as those two boys out there drinking their tea on my time are only just finding out.”

  “Anyway, I had to get at a fuse box under the dashboard, and while I was doing this, I inadvertently opened the glove compartment. I looked inside—I don’t know why—but something made me do it. And I found something. A little bag.”

  Mma Ramotswe’s mind was racing ahead. He had stumbled upon illicit diamonds—she was sure of it.

  “Diamonds?”

  “No,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “Worse than that.”

  SHE LOOKED at the small bag which he had taken out of his safe and placed on the table. It was made of animal skin—a pouch really—and was similar to the bags which the Basarwa ornamented with fragments of ostrich shell and used to store herbs and pastes for their arrows.

  “I’ll open it,” he said. “I don’t want to make you touch it.”

  She watched as he untied the strings that closed the mouth of the bag. His expression was one of distaste, as if he were handling something with an offensive smell.

  And there was a smell, a dry, musty odour, as he extracted the three small objects from the bag. Now she understood. He need say nothing further. Now she understood why he had seemed so distracted and uncomfortable. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had found muti. He had found medicine.

  She said nothing as the objects were laid out on the table. What could one say about these pitiful remnants, about the bone, about the piece of skin, about the little wooden bottle, stoppered, and its awful contents?

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, reluctant to touch the objects, poked at the bone with a pencil.

  “See,” he said simply. “That’s what I found.”

  Mma Ramotswe got up from her chair and walked towards the door. She felt her stomach heave, as one does when confronted with a nauseous odour, a dead donkey in a ditch, the overpowering smell of carrion.

  The feeling passed and she turned round.

  “I’m going to take that bone and check,” she said. “We could be wrong. It could be an animal. A duiker. A hare.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head. “It won’t be,” he said. “I know what they’ll say.”

  “Even so,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Put it in an envelope and I’ll take it.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it. He was going to warn her, to tell her that it was dangerous to play around with these things, but that would imply that one believed in their power, and he did not. Did he?

  She put the envelope in her pocket and smiled.

  “Nothing can happen to me now,” she said. “I’m protected.”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni tried to laugh at her joke, but found that he could not. It was tempting Providence to use those words and he hoped that she would not have cause to regret them.

  “There’s one thing I’d like to know,” said Mma Ramotswe, as she left the office. “That car—who owned it?”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni glanced at the two mechanics. They were both out of earshot, but he lowered his voice nonetheless while he told her.

  “Charlie Gotso,” he said. “Him. That one.”

  Mma Ramotswe’s eyes widened.

  “Gotso? The important one?”

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni nodded. Everyone knew Charlie Gotso. He was one of the most influential men in the country. He had the ear of … well, he had the ear of just about everyone who counted. There was no door in the country closed to him, nobody who would turn down a request for a favour. If Charlie Gotso asked you to do something for him, you did it. If you did not, then you might find that life became more difficult later on. It was always very subtly done—your application for a licence for your business may encounter unexpected delays; or you may find that there always seemed to be speed traps on your particular route to work; or your staff grew restless and went to work for somebody else. There was never anything you could put your finger on—that was not the way in Botswana, but the effect would be very real.

  “Oh dear,” said Mma Ramotswe.

  “Exactly,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “Oh dear.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE CUTTING OF FINGERS

  AND SNAKES

  IN THE beginning, which in Gaborone really means thirty years ago, there were very few factories. In fact, when Princess Marina watched as the Union Jack was hauled down in the stadium on that windy night in 1966 and the Bechuanaland Protectorate ceased to exist, there were none. Mma Ramotswe had been an eight-year-old girl then, a pupil at the Government School at Mochudi, and only vaguely aware that anything special was happening and that something which people called freedom had arrived. But she had not felt any different the next day, and she wondered what this freedom meant. Now she knew of course, and her heart filled with pride when she thought of all they had achieved in thirty short years. The great swathe of territory which the British really had not known what to do with had prospered to become the best-run state in Africa, by far. Well could people shout Pula! Pula! Rain! Rain! with pride.

  Gaborone had grown, changing out of all recognition. When she first went there as a little girl there had been little more than several rings of houses about the Mall and the few government offices—much bigger than Mochudi, of course, and so much more impressive, with the government buildings and Seretse Khama’s house. But it was still quite small, really, if you had seen photographs of Johannesburg, or even Bulawayo. And no factories. None at all.

  Then, little by little, things had changed. Somebody built a furniture workshop which produced sturdy living-room chairs. Then somebody else decided to set up a small factory to make breeze-blocks for building houses. Others followed, and soon there was a block of land on the Lobatse Road which people began to call the Industrial Sites. This caused a great stir of pride; so this is what freedom brought, people thought. There was the Legislative Assembly and the House of Chiefs, of course, where people could say what they liked—and did—but there were also these little factories and the jobs that went with them. Now there was even a truck factory on the Francistown Road, assembling ten trucks a month to send up as far as the Congo; and all of this started from nothing!

  Mma Ramotswe knew one or two factory managers, and one factory owner. The factory owner, a Motswana who had come into the country from South Africa to enjoy the freedom denied him on the other side, had set up his bolt works with a tiny amount of capital, a few scraps of secondhand machinery bought from a bankruptcy sale in Bulawayo, and a workforce consisting of his brother-in-law, himself, and a mentally handicapped boy whom he had found sitting under a tree and who had proved to be quite capable of sorting bolts. The business had prospered, largely because the idea behind it was so simple. All that the factory made was a single sort of bolt, of the sort which was needed for fixing galvanised tin roof sheeting onto roof beams. This was a simple process, which required only one sort of machine—a machine of a sort that never seemed to break down and rarely needed servicing.

  Hector Lepodise’s factory grew rapidly, and by the time Mma Ramotswe got to know him, he was employing thirty people and producing bolts that held roofs onto their beams as far north as Malawi. At first all his employee
s had been his relatives, with the exception of the mentally handicapped boy, who had subsequently been promoted to tea-boy. As the business grew, however, the supply of relatives dwindled, and Hector began to employ strangers. He maintained his earlier paternalistic employment habits, though—there was always plenty of time off for funerals as well as full pay for those who were genuinely sick—and his workers, as a result, were usually fiercely loyal to him. Yet with a staff of thirty, of whom only twelve were relatives, it was inevitable that there would be some who would attempt to exploit his kindness, and this is where Mma Ramotswe came in.

  “I can’t put my finger on it,” said Hector, as he drank coffee with Mma Ramotswe on the verandah of the President Hotel, “but I’ve never trusted that man. He only came to me about six months ago, and now this.”

  “Where had he been working before?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “What did they say about him?”

  Hector shrugged. “He had a reference from a factory over the border. I wrote to them but they didn’t bother to reply. Some of them don’t take us seriously, you know. They treat us as one of their wretched Bantustans. You know what they’re like.”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. She did. They were not all bad, of course. But many of them were awful, which somehow eclipsed the better qualities of some of the nice ones. It was very sad.

  “So he came to me just six months ago,” Hector continued. “He was quite good at working the machinery, and so I put him on the new machine I bought from that Dutchman. He worked it well, and I upped his pay by fifty pula a month. Then suddenly he left me, and that was that.”

  “Any reason?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

  Hector frowned. “None that I could make out. He collected his pay on a Friday and just did not come back. That was about two months ago. Then the next I heard from him was through an attorney in Mahalapye. He wrote me a letter saying that his client, Mr Solomon Moretsi, was starting a legal action against me for four thousand pula for the loss of a finger owing to an industrial accident in my factory.”

  Mma Ramotswe poured another cup of coffee for them both while she digested this development. “And was there an accident?”

  “We have an incident book in the works,” said Hector. “If anybody gets hurt, they have to enter the details in the book. I looked at the date which the attorney mentioned and I saw that there had been something. Moretsi had entered that he had hurt a finger on his right hand. He wrote that he had put a bandage on it and it seemed all right. I asked around, and somebody said that he had mentioned to them that he was leaving his machine for a while to fix his finger which he had cut. They thought it had not been a big cut, and nobody had bothered any more about it.”

  “Then he left?”

  “Yes,” said Hector. “That was a few days before he left.”

  Mma Ramotswe looked at her friend. He was an honest man, she knew, and a good employer. If anybody had been hurt she was sure that he would have done his best for them.

  Hector took a sip of his coffee. “I don’t trust that man,” he said. “I don’t think I ever did. I simply don’t believe that he lost a finger in my factory. He may have lost a finger somewhere else, but that has nothing to do with me.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “You want me to find this finger for you? Is that why you asked me to the President Hotel?”

  Hector laughed. “Yes. And I also asked you because I enjoy sitting here with you and I would like to ask you to marry me. But I know that the answer will always be the same.”

  Mma Ramotswe reached out and patted her friend on the arm.

  “Marriage is all very well,” she said. “But being the No. 1 lady detective in the country is not an easy life. I couldn’t sit at home and cook—you know that.”

  Hector shook his head. “I’ve always promised you a cook. Two cooks, if you like. You could still be a detective.”

  Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “No,” she said. “You can carry on asking me, Hector Lepodise, but I’m afraid that the answer is still no. I like you as a friend, but I do not want a husband. I am finished with husbands for good.”

  MMA RAMOTSWE examined the papers in the office of Hector’s factory. It was a hot and uncomfortable room, unprotected from the noise of the factory, and with barely enough space for the two filing cabinets and two desks which furnished it. Papers lay scattered on the surface of each desk; receipts, bills, technical catalogues.

  “If only I had a wife,” said Hector. “Then this office would not be such a mess. There would be places to sit down and flowers in a vase on my desk. A woman would make all the difference.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled at his remark, but said nothing. She picked up the grubby exercise book which he had placed in front of her and paged through it. This was the incident book, and there, sure enough, was the entry detailing Moretsi’s injury, the words spelled out in capitals in a barely literate hand:

  MORETSI CUT HIS FINGER. NO. 2 FINGER COUNTING FROM THUMB. MACHINE DID IT. RIGHT HAND. BANDAGE PUT ON BY SAME. SIGNED: SOLOMON MORETSI. WITNESS: JESUS CHRIST.

  She reread the entry and then looked at the attorney’s letter. The dates tallied: “My client says that the accident occurred on 10th May last. He attended at the Princess Marina Hospital the following day. The wound was dressed, but osteomyelitis set in. The following week surgery was performed and the damaged finger was amputated at the proximal phalangeal joint (see attached hospital report). My client claims that this accident was due entirely to your negligence in failing adequately to fence working parts of machinery operated in your factory and has instructed me to raise an action for damages on his behalf. It would clearly be in the interests of all concerned if this action were to be settled promptly and my client has accordingly been advised that the sum of four thousand pula will be acceptable to him in lieu of court-awarded damages.”

  Mma Ramotswe read the remainder of the letter, which as far as she could make out was meaningless jargon which the attorney had been taught at law school. They were impossible, these people; they had a few years of lectures at the University of Botswana and they set themselves up as experts on everything. What did they know of life? All they knew was how to parrot the stock phrases of their profession and to continue to be obstinate until somebody, somewhere, paid up. They won by attrition in most cases, but they themselves concluded it was skill. Few of them would survive in her profession, which required tact and perspicacity.

  She looked at the copy of the medical report. It was brief and said exactly what the attorney had paraphrased. The date was right; the headed note paper looked authentic; and there was the doctor’s signature at the bottom. It was a name she knew.

  Mma Ramotswe looked up from the papers to see Hector staring at her expectantly.

  “It seems straightforward,” she said. “He cut his finger and it became infected. What do your insurance people say?”

  Hector sighed. “They say I should pay up. They say that they’ll cover me for it and it would be cheaper in the long run. Once one starts paying lawyers to defend it, then the costs can very quickly overtake the damages. Apparently they’ll settle up to ten thousand pula without fighting, although they asked me not to tell anybody about that. They would not like people to think they’re an easy touch.”

  “Shouldn’t you do what they say?” asked Mma Ramotswe. It seemed to her that there was no real point in denying that the accident had happened. Obviously this man had lost a finger and deserved some compensation; why should Hector make such a fuss about this when he did not even have to pay?

  Hector guessed what she was thinking. “I won’t,” he said. “I just refuse. Refuse. Why should I pay money to somebody who I think is trying to cheat me? If I pay him this time, then he’ll go on to somebody else. I’d rather give that four thousand pula to somebody who deserved it.”

  He pointed to the door that linked the office to the factory floor.

  “I’ve got a woman in there,” he said, “with ten children. Yes, ten. She’s a good worker too. Think what she
could do with four thousand pula.”

  “But she hasn’t lost a finger,” interrupted Mma Ramotswe. “He might need that money if he can’t work so well anymore.”

  “Bah! Bah! He’s a crook, that man. I couldn’t sack him because I had nothing on him. But I knew he was no good. And some of the others didn’t like him either. The boy who makes the tea, the one with a hole in his brain, he can always tell. He wouldn’t take tea to him. He said that the man was a dog and couldn’t drink tea. You see, he knew. These people sense these things.”

  “But there’s a big difference between entertaining suspicions and being able to prove something,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You couldn’t stand up in the High Court in Lobatse and say that there was something about this man which was not quite right. The judge would just laugh at you. That’s what judges do when people say that sort of thing. They just laugh.”

  Hector was silent.

  “Just settle,” said Mma Ramotswe quietly. “Do what the insurance people tell you to do. Otherwise you’ll end up with a bill for far more than four thousand pula.”

  Hector shook his head. “I won’t pay for something I didn’t do,” he said through clenched teeth. “I want you to find out what this man is up to. But if you come back to me in a week’s time and say that I am wrong, then I will pay without a murmur. Will that do?”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. She could understand his reluctance to pay damages he thought he didn’t owe, and her fee for a week’s work would not be high. He was a wealthy man, and he was entitled to spend his own money in pursuit of a principle; and, if Moretsi was lying, then a fraudster would have been confounded in the process. So she agreed to act, and she drove away in her little white van wondering how she could prove that the missing finger had nothing to do with Hector’s factory. As she parked the van outside her office and walked into the cool of her waiting room, she realised that she had absolutely no idea how to proceed. It had all the appearances of a hopeless case.