The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party (9 page)

Then she saw the house, standing beside a large thorn tree that had thickened considerably, its upper branches making a dense crown, like a head of unruly hair among the ranks of the well-barbered. It was not an imposing house, but it was more than the single-room structures that served many who lived out in the bush. The roof, like the roofs of almost all farmhouses, was made of corrugated iron, bolted on and painted red. This covered not only the main part of the house, but the shady verandah that ran the length of the front, the space between the whitewashed pillars gauzed in against flies. Behind the house, in a cluster several hundred yards away, was a small group of buildings that made up the servants’ quarters. There were always such dwellings—the abode of the cook, or the man who tended the yard, or the woman who did the washing and ironing; so normal and unexceptionable as to attract no attention, the places where lives were led in the shadow of the employer in the larger house. And the cause, Mma Ramotswe knew from long experience, of deep resentments and, on occasion, murderous hatreds. Those flowed from exploitation and bad treatment—the things that people would do to one another with utter predictability and inevitability unless those in authority made it impossible and laid down conditions of employment. She had seen shocking things in the course of her work, even here in Botswana, a good country where things were well run and people had rights; human nature, of course, would find its way round the best of rules and regulations.

As she nosed the van into a patch of shade under the large
thorn tree beside the house, the thought came to her that the solution to Mr. Moeti’s problem might be simpler than he imagined. It always surprised her that people could be so blind to the obvious; that a person could mistreat a servant and then show surprise when the one they abused hit back. She had seen this time and time again, and she had even thought of writing to Clovis Andersen and proposing a new rule for inclusion in a future edition of
The Principles of Private Detection.
This rule would state, quite simply:
If you are looking for somebody who hates your client, then first of all look under the client’s own roof.
And now, getting out of the van and looking over towards the house, she studied the red iron roof under which, perhaps, resentments were burning. The roof looked back at her, impassive and tight-lipped under her suspicion, and she remembered a proposition that was already included in Clovis Andersen’s great work which was just as pertinent to this situation as was any suggestion of hers:
Don’t think you know all the answers,
Mr. Andersen had written, and had gone on, with admirable economy, to explain why this should be so:
because you don’t.

A figure appeared on the verandah. Smoothing out the creases in her dress, Mma Ramotswe walked towards the house. The figure now revealed itself as a woman, clad in a dull shift dress over which an old blue gingham apron had been donned.

Mma Ramotswe called out the universal greeting of the Tswana world—“
Dumela,
Mma”—and the woman responded appropriately, though in a rather strange, high-pitched voice.

“I have come to see Mr. Moeti. Is he in the house?”

The woman nodded. “He is sleeping.”

Mma Ramotswe looked at her watch. “He said I should come.”

The woman looked at her blankly. “But he is sleeping, Mma. He cannot talk if he is sleeping.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled. “No, nobody can do that. But perhaps he would like you to wake him up.”

The woman shook her head. “Men do not like to be woken up, Mma. Sorry.”

Mma Ramotswe frowned. There was something strange about this woman, a deliberate obduracy that went beyond the reluctance of a servant to disturb an employer. She wondered:
Is this her? Is this the one?
That might seem impossibly simple, but Mma Ramotswe had often found a culprit on very first enquiry. People gave themselves away, she thought; they so often did. Guilt shone out of their eyes like the beam of a hunter’s lamp in the darkness. What, she wondered, would happen if she were to come right out and ask this woman:
Why did you do what you did to the cattle?

“His cattle,” said Mma Ramotswe. She had not planned to say it, but the thought had somehow nudged the word out into the open, as a chance remark will sometimes be made against our better judgement. It was true that words slipped out; they did; they jumped out of our mouths and said,
Look, you’ve let us loose!

The woman froze. “His cattle, Mma? What of them?”

Mma Ramotswe watched her eyes carefully. The woman’s gaze slid away, off to the unruly thorn tree. Guilt. Unambiguous guilt.

“He has had some trouble with his cattle, Mma. I have come to sort it out. To get to the bottom of it.”

The woman’s eyes moved. She was looking at Mma Ramotswe again, and the fright that had greeted her initial remark had been replaced by a look of blankness. “I can wake him up if you like, Mma.”

“A good idea,” said Mma Ramotswe.

SHE WAS READY
to detect in Mr. Moeti’s expression the fear that she had seen before, but it was not there, at least to begin with. She met him on the verandah, where he shook hands with her and invited her to sit down on a traditional Tswana chair. The supports of the chair were made of panga panga wood; leather thongs, threaded carefully in a criss-cross pattern, formed the seat and back.

“A good chair, Rra,” she said. “A village chair.”

He smiled at the compliment. “I have always had chairs like that,” he said. “They belonged to my father, who was a village headman, and they came to me when he became late. Now there is only one—the other one was sat in by a very heavy person, one of the fattest men in the country, I think, and it collapsed.”

Mma Ramotswe did not stir. The chair beneath her felt solid enough, but it certainly had creaked and even yielded a bit when she had put her weight on it. A chair should be able to support a traditionally built person, and that should apply in particular, she felt, to a traditional chair.

“But you haven’t come to see me about chairs, Mma Ramotswe,” Mr. Moeti continued, seating himself casually on the low parapet of the verandah.

“I came because of your problem,” said Mma Ramotswe. She noticed in the corner of her eye that the woman in the apron was hovering in the doorway. “That private problem you told me about.”

Noticing the look, Mr. Moeti flashed a quick dismissive glance in the woman’s direction.

“That is the woman who looks after the kitchen,” he said. “She has been here forever. Most of these people”—he gestured towards the surrounding bush—“were born on this land. I suppose it’s as much theirs as it is mine, except … except that it isn’t.”

She looked at him quizzically. “I’m not sure if I follow you, Rra.”

He laughed. “I’m not surprised. I didn’t put that very well. What I meant to say is that these people—the people who work for me on the farm—were born here. Their fathers worked for the farmer who owned this place before me. Now they work for me. They’re fixtures, really.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. She understood perfectly well; the land came with people, and with the stories of those people. And so when somebody bought the land—as people could do, if they had the money—then they bought not only the land but its people too. For the most part, the new owners would understand that, unless they were foreigners who had no idea of the meaning of land in Africa. But Mr. Moeti, a Motswana, would know exactly what obligations land ownership brought; or she hoped he would. If he did not, then he would soon make enemies, and could easily find that his property came under attack. It was only too easy to start a bush fire, to turn a swathe of golden-grassed cattle range into charred stubble; it was only too easy to take a knife to the Achilles tendon of a cow.

“Are there many such people, Rra? Many here, I mean.”

He replied that there were. It was difficult to tell exactly how many people lived on the farm, as not only were babies always being born, but there was also movement away to the towns, or deaths. But if pressed, he would say forty people altogether, in three families. These were all related to one another through complex and convoluted genealogies that only the old people remembered, and even they were now forgetting.

“Do you get on well with them?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

His answer came quickly, and unambiguously. “If you think it’s one of them, Mma,” he said, “then you couldn’t be more wrong. I am their friend, and always have been. There are many children named after me. Go to that place where they live, over there by the
dam, and call out ‘Botsalo,’ and then see how many children come running over. No, it cannot be one of them, Mma Ramotswe.”

“I did not say it was, Rra,” she said mildly.

“You implied it.”

She shrugged. “I have to ask questions. I have to pry—otherwise, how would we find out who has done this terrible thing?”

He said that he understood this.

“And that lady in the kitchen?” Mma Ramotswe went on to ask, looking into the house, her voice lowered. “What about her?”

Mr. Moeti hesitated. “That lady is a very close friend, Mma. She is my wife, but isn’t my wife, if you understand me.”

She understood, but reflected for a moment on his curious way of throwing opposites together—this was the second time he had done it. “You have a wife, Rra? A legal one?”

He pointed. “She is down in Lobatse. She prefers to be in town. She lives here but she doesn’t live here, if you see what I mean.”

Now it occurred to Mma Ramotswe that there was another suspect: the wife who was a wife but who also was not. If she knew of the other woman, the resident mistress, then might she not try to get even with her husband? Wronged women did not always take it out on the other woman, Mma Ramotswe knew; often they reserved their venom for the man who had let them down. If there was resentment on the part of the real Mma Moeti—the Mma Moeti who was but was not—then she might well take it out on her errant husband’s cattle. After all, a man’s cattle were his
representatives
in a sense, and any insult offered to them was an insult to the owner; or so her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, had always maintained, though partly, she thought, with tongue in cheek. She remembered how, when she was a little girl, she saw him raise his battered old hat to some cattle beside the road; she had asked him
why, and he had explained that they were cattle of a respected man, of chiefly family, and he was merely according him the respect that such beasts deserved. But then he had smiled, and winked at her, and she realised that the remarks of adults might not always mean what they appeared to mean.

There was a silence as Mma Ramotswe digested Botsalo Moeti’s disclosures about his wife. She did not approve of such arrangements, but she did not show her disapproval: he was her client and it was not for her to speak to him about fidelity and those other things that the government advertisements spelled out so carefully. If people like him—well-placed men of experience and status—behaved in a cavalier way towards women, then what hope was there for getting people like Charlie to conduct themselves more responsibly?

Charlie: there was another problem, adding to the list of problems she already had. Moeti, Charlie, the sighting of the white van: these were issues enough to interfere with anybody’s sleep.

Moeti’s stomach now broke the silence with a loud gurgling sound. “Juices,” he explained. “I have too many juices in my stomach.”

Mma Ramotswe raised an eyebrow. “Juices are a big problem for some,” she said.

There was a note of criticism in her voice—just a touch—but Mr. Moeti did not pick it up, or if he did, gave no indication of having done so.

“I’d like to show you the place where the last attack happened,” he said. “Are you ready to come with me, Mma, or would you like some water first?”

She asked for water, and he called out to the woman in the house. “Water for this lady, Mma. A big glass. Very big.”

She did not blink. Why did he imagine that she would want a
very big glass? Was it because she was traditionally built? If so, then he had no right to assume that a traditionally built person would drink more than a moderate amount of water. Traditionally built people did not necessarily eat or drink more than those of less substantial construction. It just did not follow.

The woman in the apron brought out a glass on a tray. On the surface of the glass were her greasy fingerprints, each swirl and whorl perfectly outlined, as if etched by an engraver. These prints were about the rim too, which, for some inexplicable reason, the woman had contrived to touch. Although Mma Ramotswe was not unduly fastidious, believing that a reasonable degree of exposure to the germs of others helped maintain healthy resistance, she did not think there was a need to handle a glass quite so thoroughly before offering it to another.

“Look at these wonderful fingerprints,” she said, as the woman offered her the tray. “How useful for a detective!”

The woman looked at her blankly.

“Mma Ramotswe is making a joke,” said Mr. Moeti to the woman, in a tone of condescension. “It is a joke for Gaborone people, not for rural people like you.”