The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party (14 page)

Mma Ramotswe made a calming gesture. “Mma Makutsi, please …”

“Justice,” said Mma Makutsi. “That’s what I believe in, Mma. Justice for wronged women, that’s all.”

Mma Ramotswe rose to her feet. “Fanwell, you come with me for a moment. Just come with me.” She pointed to the door.

They went out through the garage, past the car on which the young man and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had been working.

“That poor car,” remarked Mma Ramotswe. “It looks so sad with all its parts exposed like that. And yet you and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni will put it all together again and it will be as good as new. It’s a great skill you have, Rra.”

Fanwell smiled with pleasure. “Thank you, Mma. It is easy when you know how.”

It is easy when you know how.
Yes, thought Mma Ramotswe. It was easy when you knew how, and right at that moment she was thinking of how Mma Makutsi most certainly did
not
know how, at least when it came to dealing with young men.

They went out from under the shade of the garage eaves, out into the warm morning sun; above them an empty sky, so high, so pale, and a bird, a speck of black, circling in a thermal current.
Mma Ramotswe took Fanwell’s arm and walked with him towards the acacia tree behind the garage. The young man, she noticed, was shivering, as if a cold breeze had suddenly blown up from somewhere; but the air was still.

“You’re upset, Fanwell, aren’t you? You’re shivering.”

He nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Why?” she asked. “Are you afraid of something?”

He did not answer immediately, but looked up into the sky. She followed his gaze. There was nothing;
or nothing I can see,
she thought.

“Charlie told me not to tell anybody,” he said. “He has come to my place.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. That made sense.

“So he is staying at your place? With your grandmother and the children?”

“Eee, Mma.” It was the way that people said yes, and it could be said through an exhalation of breath. It was an eloquent sound, capable of registering a range of emotions. The suggestion here was of regret, tinged with fear.

“It is not right that he should put you in this position,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Charlie should not put his problems on your shoulders.”

Fanwell turned to face her. “He said he would kill me.”

Mma Ramotswe gasped. “Charlie said that?”

Fanwell inclined his head. “He said that if I told anybody where he was, he would kill me.”

Mma Ramotswe snorted. “What nonsense! He didn’t mean that, Fanwell. You know how Charlie is always talking nonsense. Big words that mean nothing—nothing at all.”

Fanwell was not convinced. “He meant it, Mma. He put his fist in my face like this—shaking it about—and then he said that if I told anybody he would come at night when I was sleeping and
pinch my nose so that I had no air. He showed me how he would do it.”

“Pinch your nose!” exploded Mma Ramotswe. “That is complete, one hundred per cent nonsense, Fanwell. You cannot stop a person breathing like that. If you pinch somebody’s nose, then they simply open their mouth and breathe that way. Charlie was joking—he must have been.”

Fanwell listened to her, but still looked miserable. “Please do not come to fetch him,” he said. “I do not want that. Even if he does not kill me, he will do something bad to me.”

Mma Ramotswe reached out to touch him lightly on the forearm. “Very well,” she said. “I will not come and look for him.”

“And you won’t tell Mma Makutsi?”

She assured him that she would not. “But you will have to do something for me,” she said. “You must tell him that I have offered to help him. You must give him that message from me. You must tell him that he should come to my house—at night if he likes. He should come to see me and I can tell him how I shall be able to help him.”

She waited for the young man to respond, and eventually he did. He would pass this message on to Charlie, he said, and he would try to persuade him.

They walked back to the garage, where Mma Ramotswe left him while she went back into the office.

“Where is he, then?” asked Mma Makutsi. “Did you get it out of him?”

Mma Ramotswe put a finger to her lips. “Subject closed, Mma,” she said. “Closed until further notice.”

She looked over her shoulder through the open door into the garage. Fanwell was standing next to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, looking down at the engine on which they were working. He seemed so slight beside the well-set figure of the older mechanic—not much
more than a boy really, with all the vulnerability that boys have. The sight tugged at her heart and she turned away again. She knew that Fanwell supported his grandmother and several of his younger brothers and sisters on his tiny salary as an apprentice. Yet he never so much as mentioned this fact, nor complained about it. This made her think: those who have a great deal to complain about are so often silent in their suffering, while those who have little to be dissatisfied with are frequently highly vocal about it.

 
CHAPTER NINE
 
 WITH REFERENCE TO THAT PREVIOUS KISS

M
MA RAMOTSWE
liked to leave the concerns of the office where they belonged—in the office. But that evening, as she drove home from work, following the tree-lined route that she liked to take through the older area of town known simply as the Village, she found herself thinking of the Moeti case. She had done nothing about it that day—there had been other things to claim her attention—but now she found herself considering possibilities. As often happened, the words of Clovis Andersen came to mind. His general advice, applicable to almost all cases, was to talk to as many people as possible, or rather to get them to talk to you.
The more you listen, the more you learn,
he wrote in
The Principles of Private Detection,
and Mma Ramotswe had been particularly struck by the wisdom of these words, even on one occasion drawing them to the attention of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. He had frowned, inclined his head, and said, “Well, Mma, I think that is certainly true. You cannot learn anything if you close your ears. I think that is undoubtedly true.”

She had gone so far as to work these words into a small needlework sampler that she had embarked upon, the words forming the
centre part of the piece, with detailed pictures of Kalahari flowers around the edge, all executed in colourful thread. She had been pleased with the result, and had donated it to the sale of work in aid of the Anglican Hospice. It had sold well, she was told, to the wife of a hotel manager, a woman widely known to be something of a gossip. The humour of this had not escaped the ladies running the sale of work, who had all agreed that the woman in question was contemplating the listening being done by others rather than by herself.

Mma Ramotswe was certainly prepared to listen to anybody who had any light to shed on the unfortunate fate of Mr. Moeti’s cattle, but she realised that it was going to be difficult to find that person or persons. It would be different if the case were in some suburb of Gaborone, or even in a village; one could always find somebody in the street with views to express—one of the neighbours usually. But this was in the country, where one’s only company as often as not were the birds, or the small creatures that scurried through the bush. There was that boy, she recalled, and the woman who worked in the house. Mpho seemed to know something, but he was clearly frightened of Mr. Moeti—for whatever reason—and she doubted whether she would get anything out of him. Unless, of course, she were able to speak to the boy in private, if she could somehow get him on his own somewhere. Boys could be good informants, as she had discovered on a number of earlier occasions; boys saw things, and remembered them.

As she paused at a crossroads to allow a couple of trucks to lumber past, she considered the chances of a private conversation with Mpho. The boy was the son of the woman who worked in the house, the one she had met, so he presumably lived with his mother in the staff quarters behind the house. She was not sure how old he was, even if she was certain that he was under the age
of legal employment; but that made no difference. There were plenty of children who worked on farms, unofficially, and there were even some who worked in towns.
Bobashi
were children whose parents were dead, or who had run away from home and who survived by their wits. They tended to be found in the towns rather than in the country; she had even come across one who lived in a storm-water drain, a scrap of a child with a face that had seemed so prematurely worldly-wise. She had tried to bring the child to the attention of Mma Potokwane, but when she had driven the matron to the place where she had spotted him, he was nowhere to be seen. “They move about,” said Mma Potokwane, sadly. “One day they live in a drain, the next day they are up a tree. There is no telling with that sort of child.”

This boy was certainly not like that; he had a mother, and might even be in school. It was certainly not uncommon for children to attend school in the mornings and then work in the afternoons, especially now that the Government had made primary education compulsory. She wondered whether she would be able to speak to the mother. Botsalo Moeti had implied their relationship was a close one, but that meant very little. He would be using her, as likely as not, and she would no doubt be in awe of him—there were many such arrangements between strong men and vulnerable, desperate women. So, she thought, this woman, from her position of weakness, would not be what Clovis Andersen would call an “independent witness.”
If somebody works under somebody,
the great authority wrote,
then do not expect that person to tell the truth about the person above him. He may either lie to protect his superior, lie because he is afraid of him, or lie in order to get revenge for some insult or slight.

Mma Ramotswe decided that even if there would be no point in talking to the woman in the kitchen, it was still worth trying to seek out the boy; he knew something—she was sure of it. If he was
in school, then perhaps she could speak to him there. That would involve finding the most likely village school for him to attend and then speaking to the teacher there. She would require some sort of pretext for this. Could she offer to give a talk to the school? “The Life of a Private Detective” by Mma Precious Ramotswe. They would be surprised, she thought, and might insist on her obtaining permission from the Ministry of Education or the local council or something like that. No, that would not work; it would be far better to use the tactic that she had employed on so many previous occasions when she needed something, and that was to ask for it directly. It was a rather obvious thing to do, but in her experience it was usually very effective. If you want to know the answer to something, then go and ask somebody. It was a simple but effective adage—one that perhaps should be embroidered on a sampler and sold at fundraising sales. Well, she would try it in this case, and see what happened. And if she drew a blank, then there was still another lead to follow: the key ring that had been found near the scene of the crime.

She had no idea what to make of that, but she was now getting closer to home, and she decided to concentrate on her driving and on the thought of the meal that she would shortly be preparing. There was a large chunk of fine Botswana beef waiting in the fridge, and as she turned into Zebra Drive she imagined that she could even smell it. It would gladden the heart of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, who loved beef, and it would be good for the children too, who loved all sorts of food, without any exception that she had yet discovered. She was of that school of thought too. Beef, pumpkin, potatoes, stringy green beans, melon—all of these things were loved by Mma Ramotswe; as were cakes, biscuits, doughnuts, and red bush tea. Life was very full.

MMA MAKUTSI
also prepared a meal that evening, although she was cooking for two rather than four. Phuti had told her he would be late, as he had a meeting with a furniture supplier and would not be able to get away until almost seven o’clock. That meant that they would not sit down to eat for at least half an hour after their normal dinner-time. “Not that I mind waiting,” he said over the telephone. “I’d wait for ten hours or more for your cooking, Grace. I’d wait all day.”