The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

by Alexander McCall Smith

  They drove out to Mochudi on the old road, because that was the way that Mma Ramotswe had always travelled and because it was quieter. It was a bright morning, and there was warmth in the air; not the heat that would come in a month or so and build up over the final months of the year, but a pleasant feeling of a benign sun upon the skin. As they left Gaborone behind them, the houses and their surrounding plots gave way to the bush, to the expanses of dry grass dotted with acacia and smaller thorn bushes that were halfway between trees and shrubs. Here and there was a dry river bed, a scar of sand that would remain parched until the rainy season, when it would be covered with swift-moving dun-coloured water, a proper river for a few days until it all drained off and the bed would cake and crack in the sun.

  For a while they did not talk. Mma Ramotswe looked out of the window of her tiny white van, savouring the feeling of heading somewhere she was always happy to be going; for Mochudi was home, the place from which she had come and to which she knew that she would one day return for good. Mr Polopetsi looked straight ahead, at the road unfolding ahead of them, lost in thoughts of his own. He was waiting for Mma Ramotswe to tell him about the reason for their trip to Mochudi; she had simply said at the office that she needed to go there and would tell him all about it on the way up.

  He glanced at her sideways. “This business …”

  Mma Ramotswe was thinking of something quite different, of this road and of how she had once travelled down it by bus, unhappy to the very core of her being; but that was years ago, years. She moved her hands on the wheel. “We don’t usually get involved in cases where people have died, Rra,” she said. “We may be detectives, but not that sort.”

  Mr Polopetsi drew in his breath. Ever since he had joined the staff of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency—even in his ill-defined adjunct role—he had been waiting for something like this. Murder was what detectives were meant to investigate, was it not, and now at last they were embarked on such an enquiry.

  “Murder,” he whispered. “There have been murders?”

  Mma Ramotswe was about to laugh at the suggestion. “Oh no,” she began. But then she stopped herself, and the thought occurred to her that perhaps this was exactly what they were letting themselves in for. Tati Monyena had described the deaths as mishaps and had hinted, at the most, that there was some form of unexplained negligence behind them; he had said nothing about deliberate killing. And yet it was possible, was it not? She remembered reading somewhere about cases where hospital patients had been deliberately killed by doctors or nurses. She thought hard, probing the recesses of her memory, and it came to her. Yes, there had been such a doctor in Zimbabwe, in Bulawayo, and she had read about him. He had started to poison people while he was still at medical school in America and had continued to do so for years. These people existed. Was it possible that a person like that could have slipped into Botswana? Or could it be a nurse? They did it too sometimes, she believed. It gave them power, somebody had said. They felt powerful.

  She half-turned to Mr Polopetsi. “I hope not,” she said. “But we must keep an open mind, Rra. It is possible, I suppose.”

  They were ten miles from Mochudi now, and Mma Ramotswe spent the rest of the journey describing to Mr Polopetsi what Tati Monyena had told her: three Fridays, three unexplained deaths, and all in the same bed.

  “That cannot be a coincidence,” he said, shaking his head. “That sort of thing just does not happen.” He paused. “You know that I worked in this hospital once, Mma Ramotswe? Did I tell you that?”

  Mma Ramotswe knew that Mr Polopetsi had worked as an assistant in the pharmacy at the Princess Marina Hospital in Gaborone, and she knew of the injustice that occurred there which led to his spell in prison. But she did not know that he had been at Mochudi.

  “Yes,” Mr Polopetsi explained. “I was there for eight months, while they were short-staffed. That was about four years ago. I was in the pharmacy.” He lowered his voice as he mentioned the pharmacy, in shame, she thought. All that had turned sour for him, and all because of a lying witness and the transfer of blame. It was so unfair, but she had gone over all that with him before, several times, and she knew—they both knew—that they could do nothing to remedy it. “You are innocent in your heart,” she had said to him. “That is the most important thing.” And he had thought about that for a few moments before shaking his head and saying, “I would like that to be true, Mma, but it is not. It is what other people think. That is the most important thing.”

  Now, as they made their way through the outskirts of Mochudi, past the rash of small hairdressing establishments with their hand-painted grandiose signs, past the turn-offs that led to the larger houses of those who had made good in Gaborone and returned to the village, past the tax office and the general dealers, he said to her casually, almost as if he were thinking aloud, “I wouldn’t like to be one of his patients.”

  “Of whose patients?”

  “There was a doctor who worked at the hospital when I was there,” he said. “I didn’t like him. Nobody did. And I remember thinking: I would be frightened to be in that doctor’s care. I really would.”

  She changed gear. A donkey had wandered onto the road and was standing directly in the path of the tiny white van. It was a defeated, cowed creature, and seemed to be looking directly up at the sun.

  “That donkey is blind,” said Mr Polopetsi. “Look at him.”

  She guided the van round the static animal. “Why?” she said.

  “Why does he stand there? That is what they do. That is just the way they are.”

  “No,” she said. “That is not what I meant. I wondered what frightened you about him.”

  He thought for a few moments before answering. “You get a feeling sometimes. You just do.” He paused. “Maybe we’ll see him.”

  “Is he still there, Rra?”

  Mr Polopetsi shrugged. “He was last year. I heard from a friend. I don’t know if he has moved since then. Maybe not. He was married to a woman from Mochudi, so maybe he will still be there. He is a South African himself. Xhosa mother, Boer father.”

  Mma Ramotswe was thoughtful. “Do you know many others from the hospital staff? From that time?”

  “Many,” said Mr Polopetsi.

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. It had been a good idea, she decided, to bring Mr Polopetsi with her. Clovis Andersen, author of The Principles of Private Detection, said in one of his chapters that there was no substitute for local knowledge. It cuts hours and days off an investigation, he wrote. Local knowledge is like gold.

  Mma Ramotswe glanced at her modest assistant. It was difficult to think of Mr Polopetsi in these golden terms; he was so mild and diffident. But Clovis Andersen was usually right about these things, and she muttered gold under her breath.

  “What?” asked Mr Polopetsi.

  “We have arrived,” said Mma Ramotswe.

  TATI MONYENA was clearly proud of his office, which was scrupulously clean and which exuded the smell of polish. In the centre of the room stood a large desk on which rested a telephone, three stacked letter trays, and a small wooden sign, facing out, on which was inscribed Mr T. Monyena. Against one wall stood two grey metal filing cabinets, considerably more modern than those in Mma Ramotswe’s office, and on another wall, directly behind Tati Monyena’s chair, was a large framed picture of His Excellency, the President of the Republic of Botswana.

  Mma Ramotswe and Mr Polopetsi sat in the straight-backed chairs in front of the desk. It was a tight fit for Mma Ramotswe, and the chair-arm on each side pushed uncomfortably into her traditional waistline. Mr Polopetsi, though, barely filled his seat, and perched nervously on the edge of it, his hands clasped together on his lap.

  “It is very good of you to come so quickly,” said Tati Monyena. “We are at your disposal.” He paused. He had made a magnanimous beginning, but he was not at all sure what he could do to help Mma Ramotswe. She would want to speak to people, he imagined, even though he had spoken to the ward nurses again a
nd again, and had had several conversations with the doctors in question, in this very office; conversations in which the doctors sat where Mma Ramotswe was sitting and defensively insisted that they had no idea how these patients had died.

  “I should like to speak to the nurses,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And I should like to see the ward too, if possible.”

  Tati Monyena’s hand reached for the telephone. “I can arrange for both of those things, Mma. I shall show you the ward, and then we will bring the nurses back here so you can talk to them in this office. There are three of them who were there at the time.”

  Mma Ramotswe frowned. She did not wish to be rude, but it would not be a good idea to interview the nurses in front of Tati Monyena. “It might be better for me to see them by themselves,” she said. “Just Mr Polopetsi here and myself. That’s not to suggest …”

  Tati Monyena raised a hand to stop her. “Of course, Mma! Of course. How tactless of me! You can speak to them in private. But I don’t think they will say anything. When things go wrong, people become very careful. They forget what they have seen. They saw nothing. Nothing happened. It is always the same thing.”

  “That is human nature,” interjected Mr Polopetsi. He had been silent until then, and they both looked at him intently.

  “Of course it is,” said Tati Monyena. “It is human nature to protect ourselves. We are no different from animals in that respect.”

  “Except that they can’t tell lies,” said Mr Polopetsi.

  Tati Monyena laughed. “Of course. But that’s only because they cannot speak. I think that if they could, then they would probably lie too. Would a dog own up if some meat had been stolen? Would it say, I am the one who has eaten the meat? I do not think so.”

  Mma Ramotswe wondered whether to join in this speculative conversation, but decided against it, and sat back until the two of them should finish. But Tati Monyena rose to his feet instead and gestured towards the door. “I shall take you to the ward,” he said. “You will see the bed where these things happened.”

  They left his office and walked down a green-painted corridor. There was a hospital smell in the air, that mixture of humanity and disinfectant, and, in the background, the sound that seemed to go so well with that smell—voices somewhere, the sound of a child crying, the noise of wheels being pushed over uneven floors, the faint hum of machinery. There were posters on the wall: warnings about disease and the need to be careful; a picture of a blood spill. This, ultimately, was what our life was about, she thought, and hospitals were there to remind us: biology, human need, human suffering.

  They passed a nurse in the corridor. She was carrying a pan of some sort, covered with a stained cloth, and she smiled and half-turned to let them pass. Mma Ramotswe kept her gaze studiously away from the pan and on the nurse’s face. It was a kind face, the sort that one trusted, unlike, she imagined, the face of the doctor whom Mr Polopetsi had described.

  “It’s changed since your father was here,” said Tati Monyena. “In those days we had to make do with so little. Now we have much more.”

  “But there is never enough, is there?” said Mr Polopetsi. “We get drugs for one illness and then a new illness comes along. Or a new type of the same thing. Same devil, different clothes. Look at TB.”

  Tati Monyena sighed. “That is true. I was talking to one of the doctors the other day and he said, We thought that we had it cracked. We really did. And now …”

  But at least we can try, thought Mma Ramotswe. That is all we can do. We can try. And that, surely, is what doctors did. They did not throw up their hands and give up; they tried.

  They turned a corner. A small boy, three or four years old, wearing only a vest, his tiny stomach protruding in a small mound, his eyes wide, stood in their way. The hospital was full of such children, the offspring of patients or patients themselves, and Tati Monyena barely saw him. But the child looked at Mma Ramotswe and came up to her and reached for her hand, as children will, especially in Africa, where they will still come to you. She bent down and lifted him up. He looked at her and snuggled his head against her chest.

  “The mother of that one is late,” said Tati Monyena in a matter-of-fact voice. “Our people are deciding what to do. The nurses are looking after him.”

  The child looked up at Mma Ramotswe. She saw that his eyes were shallow; there was no light in them. His skin, she felt, was dry.

  Tati Monyena waited for her to put the child down. Then he indicated towards a further corridor to the right. “It is this way,” he said.

  The ward doors were open. It was a long room, with six beds on either side. At the far end of the room, at a desk with several cabinets about it, a nurse was sitting, looking at a piece of paper with another nurse who was leaning over her shoulder. Halfway down the ward, another couple of nurses were adjusting the sheets on one of the beds, propping up the patient against a high bank of pillows. A drugs trolley stood unattended at the foot of another bed, an array of small containers on its top shelf.

  When she saw them at the door, the nurse at the desk rose to her feet and walked down the ward to meet them. She nodded to Mma Ramotswe and Mr Polopetsi and then looked enquiringly at Tati Monyena.

  “This lady is dealing with that … that matter,” said Tati Monyena, nodding at the bed on his left. “I spoke to you about her.” He turned to Mma Ramotswe. “This is Sister Batshegi.”

  Mma Ramotswe was watching the nurse’s expression. She knew that the first moments were the significant ones, and that people gave away so much before they had time to think and to compose themselves. Sister Batshegi had looked down, not meeting Mma Ramotswe’s gaze, and then had looked up again. Did that mean anything? Mma Ramotswe thought that it meant that she was not particularly pleased to see her. But that in itself did not tell her very much. People who are busy with some task—as Sister Batshegi clearly had been—were not always pleased to be disturbed.

  “I am happy to see you, Mma,” said Sister Batshegi.

  Mma Ramotswe replied to the greeting and then turned to Tati Monyena. “That is the bed, Rra?”

  “It is.” He looked at Sister Batshegi. “Have you had anybody in it over the last few days?”

  The nurse shook her head. “There has been nobody. The last patient was that man last week—the one who had the motorcycle accident near Pilane. He got better quickly.” She turned to Mma Ramotswe. “Every time I see a motorcyle, Mma, I think of the young men we get in here …” She shrugged. “But they never think of that. They don’t.”

  “Young men often don’t think,” said Mma Ramotswe. “They cannot help it. That is how they are.” She thought of the apprentices, and reflected on what a good illustration they were of the proposition she had just made. But they would start to think sooner or later, she told herself; even Charlie would start to think. She looked at the bed, covered in its neat white sheet. Although the sheet was clean, there were brown stains on it, the stains of blood that the hospital laundry could not remove. At the top of the bed, to the side, she saw a machine with tubes and dials on a stand.

  “That is a ventilator,” said Tati Monyena. “It helps people to breathe. All three patients …” He paused, and looked at Sister Batshegi, as if for confirmation. “All three patients were on it at the time. But the machine was thoroughly checked and there was nothing wrong with it.”

  Sister Batshegi nodded. “The machine was working. And we checked the alarm. It has a battery, which was working fine. If the machine had been faulty we would have known.”

  “So you can rule out a defective ventilator,” said Tati Monyena. “That is not what caused it.”

  Sister Batshegi was vigorously of the same mind. “No. It is not that. That is not what happened.”

  Mma Ramotswe looked about her. One of the patients at the end of the ward was calling out, a cracked, unhappy voice. A nurse went over to the bed quickly.

  “I have to get on with my work,” said Sister Batshegi. “You may look round, Mma, but you will find no
thing. There is nothing to see in this place. It is just a ward. That is all.”

  MMA RAMOTSWE and Mr Polopetsi spoke to Sister Batshegi again, along with two other nurses, in Tati Monyena’s office. He had left them alone, as he had promised, but through the window they saw him hovering around anxiously in the courtyard outside, looking at his watch and fiddling with a line of pens that he had clipped in his shirt pocket. Sister Batshegi said little more than she had said in the ward, and the other two nurses, both of whom had been on duty at the time of the incidents, seemed very unwilling to say much at all. The deaths had been a surprise, they said, but they often lost very ill patients. Neither had been nearby at the time, they said, although they were quick to point out that they were both keeping a close watch on the patients involved. “If anything had happened, we would have known it,” said one of the nurses. “It is not our fault, you see, Mma. It is just not our fault.”

  It did not take long to interview them, and then Mma Ramotswe and Mr Polopetsi were alone in the office before Tati Monyena came back.

  “Those nurses were scared about something,” said Mr Polopetsi. “Did you see the way they looked? Did you hear it in their voices?”

  Mma Ramotswe had to agree. “But what are they scared of?” she asked.

  Mr Polopetsi thought for a moment. “They are scared of some person,” he said. “Some unknown person is frightening them.”

  “Sister Batshegi?”

  “No. Not her.”

  “Then who else is there? Tati Monyena?”

  Mr Polopetsi did not think this likely. “I think that he is somebody who would protect his staff rather than punish them,” he said. “Tati Monyena is a kind man.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to think,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But it’s time for us to leave anyway. I don’t think that there is anything more we can do here.”

  They drove back to Gaborone. They spoke to each other on the journey, but not about the visit to the hospital, as neither had much to say about that. Mr Polopetsi told Mma Ramotswe about one of his sons, who was turning out to be very good at mental arithmetic. “He is like a calculator,” he said. “He is already doing calculations that I cannot do, and he is only eight.”