In the meantime she would have to get a bus. But after the affair of the missing government office worker Machende Arimuhapwa, the bus company (whose motto was ‘We Guarantee to Get You There Alive if at all Possible’) did not instil confidence. It was as she was thinking this that her eye fell upon the small herd of cattle that her dear daddy had left her in that never-to-be-forgotten will. Would a cow do? she wondered. Could Mma Ontoaste ride a cow on her investigations? Whyever not? she thought. In many ways a cow would make an ideal mount. They were solid and dependable, much like her beloved Botswana, and one could hang things from their horns such as bags of produce one had bought from the market in Castle Terrace.
The only problem with the new plan was that Mma Ontoaste was a large woman who might very easily crush the cow to death. This was a serious problem. Mma Ontoaste could have lost some weight, of course, and there was some medical evidence to suggest that it was not healthy to be so heavily ‘built’, but it was good to be fat and that, as her husband Mr JPS Spagatoni, that good man, that good man who fried chips for a living, might say, was that. Some people liked modern-shaped ladies, of course, of the sort who could resist the temptation of an extra slice of cake with their bush tea in the afternoons while they were sitting and talking to old friends, but Mma Delicious Ontoaste was not one of these ladies. She was the sort of lady who knew the importance of sitting and eating and so, when she approached the herd of cows, sheltering in the shade of a mopane tree, she did so with consideration for the pain that she might be about to inflict upon one of their number.
CHAPTER FOUR
In which a bottle of Irn-Bru comes between a man and his wife with some quite bad consequences.
It was just as Mr JPS Spagatoni of the Salt-’n’-Sauce Scotch Chip Supper Shop on Murieston Road, Botswana’s leading Scotch chip shop, was drying his hands on another piece of clean lint and watching one of the trainee fryers cut a cauliflower into individual florets for dipping in batter, that he realised that something was wrong. Mr JPS Spagatoni was a good man, but that is not to say he was a clever man, and so, although he was the best fryer of pizza Calzone suppers in the land – a fact of which he was enormously proud – it took him some moments to realise what it was that had been bothering him for the past few days. There was, he finally realised, no music.
The radio, which he had kept on the top shelf on the wall behind the counter, along with catering-sized jars of pickled eggs and boxes of spare plastic chip forks, was missing. It had been an old leather-bound Roberts transistor radio with a coat-hanger in place of an aerial, and Forth Radio had been playing in the shop for as long as Mr JPS Spagatoni could remember. Now though all he could hear was the steady buzz of the extractor fan and the low murmur of the seething oil. Where was the radio?
‘Dennis?’ he asked the trainee. ‘Have you seen the radio? It was up there on that shelf and now it has gone.’
‘No, Rra,’ said Dennis. ‘I have not seen the radio.’
This seemed straightforward enough. So the radio had been stolen. Thank God I am just a humble fryer of fish, thought Mr JPS Spagatoni, and not a great detective like Mma Ontoaste. She will know what to do in a case like this. Mma Ontoaste would be able to come up with a plan.
And at that moment, through the door of his chip shop Mr JPS Spagatoni, that good man, saw Mma Ontoaste arriving outside, struggling to parallel park her cow on Murieston Road.
Mr JPS Spagatoni and Mma Ontoaste had been married for three years now and in all that time, so busy had they been with foaming bush tea, errant vans, frying potato suppers and staring at the scenery that they had spent not one minute alone together, and so no one in Botswana, that good country, could say for certain what they did when they were alone, or comment on the state of their relationship, and this, perhaps, was a good thing. There was too much of that sort of thing in the world. After all, whose business was it what they did when they were alone? Mma Ontoaste and Mr JPS Spagatoni had shown that it was possible to glean an idea of someone’s character without intruding on their most private or intimate moments. But no one who knew them even in passing could resist speculating on what really lay between them and, in the vacuum, the theories were legion.
While Mma Ontoaste ate a pizza Calzone supper with extra salt and sauce, Mr JPS Spagatoni told her about the missing radio. Mma Ontoaste listened in silence, her eye drifting over the entertainment section of the newspaper, and when Mr JPS Spagatoni had finished he stepped back and waited to hear what her plan would be.
‘There is a circus in town, you know, Rra? It has come all the way from the North Pole!’
‘Oh the North Pole is a long way away, Mma,’ said Dennis. ‘I hope the polar bears are not suffering too much in our climate. All that fur is not good.’
‘But what about the radio, Mma?’ asked Mr JPS Spagatoni.
There was a silence for a few seconds. Mma Ontoaste seemed to have returned to the paper, where she was reading a story about a break-in at the Botswana National Museum that had occurred some weeks before. After a second she looked up. She had not been listening to Mr JPS Spagatoni or Dennis at all.
‘Rra,’ she said. ‘Can I have a bottle of Irn-Bru?’
‘A bottle of Irn-Bru?’ asked Mr JPS Spagatoni, stunned for a moment. Mma Ontoaste did not drink Irn-Bru. She drank bush tea.
‘Is there something wrong, Mma?’ he asked.
‘No, Rra. I just fancied a change.’
A change? First there was the way in which Mma Ontoaste had asked Mma Pollosopresso to leave. Then there was the cow inconsiderately parked in the sun outside (and getting a ticket, Mr JPS Spagatoni could see, through the door of his grass-hutted chip shop) and now Irn-Bru instead of bush tea. No one doubted Irn-Bru’s revitalising qualities, of course, but still: this was not the Mma Ontoaste whom Mr JPS Spagatoni knew and loved. He blamed this new assistant.
‘Well Mma, what about my radio?’ he asked. ‘Have you had any further thoughts on that?’
‘Rra,’ she said, tipping her head back and draining the bottle of orange liquid in three large gulps, so that when she finished she looked at him with watery eyes. ‘I have to tell you I am completely bloody mystified by the puzzle of your absent radio.’
Mr JPS Spagatoni leapt back. Had he heard her right? It was not her pessimism in the face of this difficult case that horrified him, although that did as well; it was her use of the B word.
‘Mma!’ he cried. ‘What is wrong with you?’
CHAPTER FIVE
Mma Ontoaste has a drunken realisation but is bitten by a snake on the ankle and then falls in the pumpkin patch (again).
If lunch at the Salt ’N’ Sauce Scotch Chip Supper Shop had not gone according to plan, thought Mma Ontoaste, it was not her doing. As she had learned over the years, it was always easier to advise other people how to live their lives. The difficulty came, thought Mma Ontoaste, as she found the bottle of neat spirit and a dusty glass on the top shelf in her grass hut, with one’s own life. It was never so easy to know what one ought to do oneself. Today though, she felt like getting absolutely shit-faced, so she thought that is what she ought to do.
And it was later that evening, just as Mma Ontoaste was stumbling towards the vegetable patch to find a pumpkin to soak up the booze, that it happened. It struck her as she was crossing the yard to her grass hut. She realised suddenly that she had changed. She was no longer the Mma Ontoaste of old. She was no longer full of the kindly wisdom, the love of her land, with the insight and the strength to endure Africa’s countless hardships.
As she stood rooted in the middle of her shabby yard, looking at her unkempt grass hut, she found herself wondering why she could not have just forgiven Mma Pollosopresso for being so stupid as to only get 97 per cent in her final examination at the Napier Secretarial College. Was not forgiveness what Mma Ontoaste was all about? And if that was so, then why could she not have forgiven that Nigerian for working for the Botswana Postal Service? She had not even bothered to think for a single min
ute about the circumstances that might make a man, even a Nigerian, eke out an honest living delivering mail when he should be ‘phishing’ for the details of old ladies’ bank accounts. Why had she developed this sudden taste for Irn-Bru? And why was she now riding around Gaborone on a cow?
But there was more to it than that. Why had she been unable to find out who it really was who had blown up her tiny white van? Why had she just blamed Mma Pollosopresso? And why was she unable to tell that good man, Mr JPS Spagatoni, where his radio had gone? And what about the woman whose husband had gone to work on the bus? That sort of problem should have been meat and drink to a detective of Mma Ontoaste’s stature.
It struck Mma Ontoaste forcibly then that she had lost her powers of detection but, worse than that, worse than almost anything, she had lost the delightful Feel Good Factor. She was no longer the Miss Read for the 21st century and Gaborone was no longer the sub-Saharan Fairacre that it had once been.
Mma Ontoaste stood in the yard staring up at the huge white moon that had risen overhead. She started to weep and she let the bitter tears roll down her cheeks and hang off her chin.
‘Oh Rra!’ she cried aloud. ‘Oh, Rra!’
And it was then that the snake bit her.
There are more than 60 types of snake in Botswana, but of these only 12 are venomous, so although Mma Ontoaste was unlucky to be bitten by one of these 12 poisonous snakes, a snake known as the lebolobolo, she was at least lucky that it was a baby lebolobolo.
It was not, however, the relative youth of the snake that had saved the life of Mma Ontoaste. Rather it was the fact that less than quarter of an hour after the snake had bitten her, the stock gate had been pushed open and a woman carrying the most enormous elephant gun you have ever seen had entered the yard and pointed the muzzle at the head of her very nearly late ex-employer.
CHAPTER SIX
Mma Pollosopresso saves the day but Mr JPS Spagatoni is carted off to hospital where he may or may not die.
Mma Pollosopresso had always been frightened of snakes and she guessed immediately what had happened to her ex-employer. But as she stood there, pointing the huge gun at Mma Ontoaste’s temple, it occurred to her that this might have made a very fine 11 o’clock Moral Dilemma. If Mma Pollosopresso did not shoot her, then Mma Ontoaste would certainly die from the snakebite, wouldn’t she? So she was, in effect, already dead, which meant that if Mma Pollosopresso shot her now, would she really be killing her? Would she not just be shooting a dead body? Even the law might be vague on that one. Mma Pollosopresso realised with a slight chuckle that the only person who might be able to hand down some sort of opinion on this matter might be the very person who was about to die: Mma Ontoaste.
It would be interesting to hear her opinion. And now that she, Mma Pollosopresso, had set up her own Detective Agency, The Only Detective Agency You Will Ever Need Ever! No. 4, they could debate the matter as equals, detective to detective. Oh that would be fun.
Mma Pollosopresso took her finger off the trigger and put the gun aside. She bent down and placed a careful hand on the detective’s neck. A ragged pulse was still beating. Mma Pollosopresso knew that she had to act fast: water and antivenom were vital, as well as some kind of pressure immobilisation that would prevent the venom leaking into Mma Ontoaste’s lymphatic system. But first Mma Pollosopresso would have to find the bite to know where she could apply her tourniquet.
It was as Mma Pollosopresso was searching the body of the redoubtable founder of The Best Detective Agency in the World Ever! No. 2 for snakebites that Mr JPS Spagatoni, that good man, returned from his day at the Salt-’n’-Sauce Scotch Chip Supper Shop on Murieston Road, out by the old UDF headquarters. As usual, it had been a long day for Mr JPS Spagatoni. He had started drinking his first 80/- beer of the day at about four that afternoon, a little while after Mma Ontoaste’s disastrous visit, and so he was now quite tanked. He was being half supported, half carried by one of the trainees, Dennis, and Mr JPS Spagatoni’s accent, always stronger when he had been drinking, made the song he was singing as they weaved their way up the road under the sodium glare of the street lights difficult to understand. Under one arm he was carrying four tins of 80/- beer and a half bottle of blended malt whisky and so it did not look as if he planned to end the day with an early night.
When they reached the yard, Dennis led his boss across to the toilet, an outside hut the practicalities of which no one ever really went into. While Mr JPS Spagatoni was micturating noisily into the bucket, Dennis noticed Mma Pollosopresso and Mma Ontoaste in the pumpkin patch.
‘Mma, what are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Oh Dennis,’ replied Mma Pollosopresso. ‘Mma Ontoaste has been bitten by a snake. Will you run to the hospital in Bobonong to get some antivenom and to ask them to send a bus to collect her and take her there?’
Dennis understood the urgency and, once he had put Mr JPS Spagatoni in that good man’s favourite chair on the veranda, he set off for the hospital almost at once. It was only when Mr JPS Spagatoni was on the other side of two of the cans of 80/- and half of the whisky that he looked up and noticed Mma Pollosopresso in the garden. He had been keeping up a steady soliloquy on the evils of people from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Malawi and, of course, the Democratic Republic of Congo all the while, and as she searched Mma Ontoaste’s body, Mma Pollosopresso knew that it was only a short matter of time before Mr JPS Spagatoni would begin to mourn the death of Bonnie Prince Charlie with tears coursing down his stubbly cheeks. After that he would ordinarily start throwing bottles and cursing the English before collapsing in a puddle of his own making.
But now he frowned into the darkness of the Botswana night and tried to work out what was going on. At first he thought it was an optical illusion. Then he thought his wife was being robbed. This stirred him to action. He staggered to his feet and made to rush at Mma Pollosopresso, waving his bottle of whisky like a knobkerrie.
‘Ah’ll ’ave ya! Ah’ll … Aaaah!’
Mr JPS Spagatoni, that drunk man, tripped on the stoop and fell heavily, the bottle of whisky spinning out of his hand and rattling across the setts to vanish under some unnamed bush. Mma Pollosopresso stood for a moment and watched nervously as he tried to right himself. He burped deeply and then vomited a chunky concoction of fish and chips and whisky and beer before finally giving up the ghost and subsiding with a muttered curse and a vague threat.
By now Mma Pollosopresso had found the bites: two tiny punctures on Mma Ontoaste’s meaty calf, and then the snake itself, crushed beneath her ex-employer. Mma Pollosopresso recognised the baby lebolobolo for what it was, and compared the bulk of Mma Ontoaste with that of the snake.
The lebolobolo was not a very poisonous snake, was it? And a stay in the hospital in Gaborone, for all of Botswana’s undoubted beauty, was not something everybody would enjoy equally. People had been known to die in the hospital, had they not? And she did not want this to happen to Mma Ontoaste. It occurred to her that, once the antivenom was administered, then perhaps it would be better if Mma Ontoaste stayed in her own bed and fought the poison where she was most comfortable.
When Dennis arrived with the minibus half an hour later, and once the antivenom was administered, Mma Pollosopresso asked the medic and the driver to help her move the redoubtable founder of The Best Detective Agency in the World Ever! No. 2 across the yard into the grass hut.
‘But Mma,’ began the driver. ‘I have to bring a body back to the hospital. It is the rules.’
No one asked why this particular rule might be in force. It was not the time or the place. Instead the story carried on and each pair of eyes drifted down to where Mr JPS Spagatoni was lying in his pool of sick. He was much lighter than Mma Ontoaste anyway, and he looked as if he would be easier to get into the back of the minibus, and so it was decided. Once they had got him in, bumping his head on the door as they went, they moved Mma Ontoaste. It was a struggle but after half an hour they managed to drag her into
her hut and onto the bed, where she lay breathing heavily but regularly.
And all that Mma Pollosopresso and Dennis needed to do was sit there and watch, occasionally pouring sips of water into her mouth and now and then mopping her brow with one of the countless pieces of lint that that not-so-good man Mr JPS Spagatoni kept lying about the place. All through the night, as the antivenom took hold, Mma Pollosopresso kept up her bedside vigil as her ex-employer hovered between life and death. It was an uncomfortable night for all concerned, but by dawn (‘sudden’ and ‘tropical’) it began to look as if the redoubtable founder of The Best Detective Agency in the World Ever! No. 2 would live, which was just as well because later that morning she was due to meet Tom Hurst, but it was more than could be said with any great certainty about Mr JPS Spagatoni, who, during the night, had received an unnecessary blood transfusion from an unqualified medic and was now lying sweating on a trolley in a corridor waiting for the attentions of a doctor who had long since gone to work in England, where the wages, if not the weather or the people, were better.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mma Ontoaste starts early and becomes a bit confused but it is all right in the end because it did not matter very much anyway and then a trip is planned!
The sky above her was as blue as it had ever been when Mma Delicious Ontoaste found herself sitting outside the café at the Sir Seretse Kharma International Airport, staring at the mug of bush tea on the table before her. Those who knew the impressively padded founder of The Best Detective Agency in the World Ever! No. 2, and there were plenty of them, for Mma Ontoaste was a popular woman among the café owners and the convenience food-stall holders all around Gaborone, might have noticed that she was looking at her bush tea with some disgust. If a lady survives being bitten by a lebolobolo snake, then the last thing she wants is bush tea, she said to herself and so, with a flick of her powerful fingers, she summoned the waitress, a girl who up until that moment had been ignoring her but who now came trotting over as quickly as she could.
The No. 2 Global Detective Page 6
