Miracle at Speedy Motors (7 page)

The woman stared at Mma Ramotswe. “Why is he talking about rock rabbits now, Mma? Can you tell me?”

Mma Ramotswe exchanged a quick glance with Mr. Polopetsi. He was well meaning, but he did not know that one should try to keep people on track when one was questioning them. Clovis Andersen himself made that point in his chapter on “Getting to the Truth” in
The Principles of Private Detection.
“Some people,” he wrote, “cannot resist the opportunity to talk about things that have nothing to do with the case. They wander off in all sorts of directions and lose sight of the subject in hand. Don’t fall into the trap of distracting them.”

“I don’t think it matters much, Mma,” she said soothingly. “I expect that he was thinking of something else. Now, why do you think this girl was ungrateful? If her parents were so kind to her, then why was she ungrateful?”

The woman reached out and laid a hand on Mma Ramotswe’s forearm. When she answered, she spoke in a low voice, so that Mr. Polopetsi had to lean forward to hear what she said. This made the woman lower her voice even further. “Her parents, you say, Mma. You say her parents. I say her parents. But that girl, she thought that they were not her parents at all! She said that herself. Not to everyone, but she said it to me once, and to another lady who knew her mother. And to a woman in the Women’s Guild at the church. She said it. She said that she came from somewhere else.”

This revelation was greeted with complete silence. Then Mma Ramotswe spoke. “And was this true, do you think?”

The woman suddenly stood up, straightening her skirt and brushing imagined dust off her sleeve. She looked up at the sky. “It is going to rain, Mma. At long last it is going to rain.”

Mma Ramotswe glanced over her shoulder at the clouds that had built up to the east. They were heavy and purple, stacked in towering layers; so sudden, so welcome. “Yes,” she said. “That is very good. The land is very thirsty.” She reached out and touched the woman’s shoulder. “But tell me one thing, Mma, and then we will leave you to get on with your…with your resting. Tell me, was it true that this girl was the child of another lady?”

The woman laughed. “Certainly not, Mma. It is certainly not true.”

“Can you be sure?” Mma Ramotswe probed.

Again the woman laughed. “Can I be sure, Mma? Of course I can. I can be sure because I was there in the house when she gave birth. We had been friends since we were girls, and I helped her when she had her baby. It was myself and the woman from the village who helped at births. We were both there, and some other women too. All the women together. I saw that girl come out of her mother. I saw it myself.” She looked at Mma Ramotswe; there was something triumphant about her manner, the look of one who had laid a canard to rest. “And I’ll tell you something else, Mma. I saw the baby open her eyes for the first time—I was right there, as close as I am to you—and I saw the look in those eyes. It was a complaining look, and I said to myself, This one will do a lot of shouting. And, do you know, Mma, straightaway that baby started to cry and make a fuss about being born. That is the sort of baby she was.”

THEY LEFT THE WOMAN,
but only after she had given them a list of other friends of the late Mma Sebina, senior. None of these women knew her as well as she did, of course, but she was sure that they would confirm what she had told them. And then, with the storm clouds now virtually upon them, they made their way back to the tiny white van.

“We can’t go and look for these people in the rain,” said Mma Ramotswe, glancing up at the purple clouds. “We shall have to come back.”

“We shall have to come back,” agreed Mr. Polopetsi, who had a habit of repeating what was said to him; an innocuous enough habit, until one noticed it.

Mma Ramotswe turned the van and they had just started back when the first drops of rain began to fall. First there was that smell, that smell of rain, so unlike anything else, but immediately recognisable and enough to make the heart of a dry person soar; for that, thought Mma Ramotswe, is what we Batswana are: dry people, people who can live with dust and dryness but whose hearts dream of rain and water. Now, in great veils, the rain fell upon Botswana; great purple-white veils joining sky to land, soaking the parched landscape.

They drove down the road through the welcome deluge, travelling slowly for the puddles and sheets of water that were forming so quickly. The tiny white van, valiant in every sort of condition, ploughed through the water like an albino hippo, while its windscreen wipers swept backwards and forwards, making it possible, just, to see a few yards ahead through the downpour. But then, as if overcome by the sheer effort of pushing aside so much water, the wipers collided with one another and became stuck. Immediately Mma Ramotswe and Mr. Polopetsi were as if shrouded in a completely impenetrable mist.

“I cannot carry on driving if I cannot see,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We shall have to stop.”

She drew the van to the side of the road, or to what she hoped was the side of the road; it was impossible to see even that.

Mr. Polopetsi rubbed at the steam on the passenger window with the sleeve of his jacket. “I will get out and fix those, Mma,” he said. “They are just stuck.”

Mma Ramotswe made a clucking sound with her tongue. “You don’t need to do that, Rra. You will get soaked. Wait until it eases a bit.”

Mr. Polopetsi peered through the small circle he had cleared in the condensation. “It will not clear quickly. This rain is going to go on for some time. I do not mind a bit of nice warm rain, Mma.” He turned to grin at her. “Why should I mind that? We have waterproof skins, do we not, Mma? Is that not what God has given us?”

He reached for the door lever and flung the door open. She felt the rain come in as he got out of the van, and then he slammed the door closed again. She saw him grappling with the windscreen wipers, which were recalcitrant. But eventually he freed them and they sprang back into operation again, describing their squeaky arcs in the still heavy rain.

When Mr. Polopetsi clambered back into the van his outer clothing was soaked.

“Look at your jacket, Rra,” she said. “You must take it off. Your shirt will be drier underneath.”

Mr. Polopetsi was stoic. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I shall get dry soon. Let’s just go back now.”

Mma Ramotswe felt that she had to insist. She could see that his shirt was damp, but had not been soaked as thoroughly as his jacket. “No,” she said, starting to tug at the neck and shoulders of the jacket. “Come on now, take it off.”

He sighed. “If you insist, Mma Ramotswe. If you insist.”

She smiled and continued to help him wriggle out of the jacket. “It is for your own good, Rra. Women know about these things.”

The jacket was off his shoulders and she gave it a shake, constrained by the small cabin of the van, but enough to get some of the moisture out. As she did so, an envelope fell out of the pocket.

“A letter,” she said. “I hope it is not wet.”

The letter had fallen on her lap, and she picked it up.

“Oh, it has my name on it,” she said. “Look. Mma Ramotswe.”

Mr. Polopetsi had become quite still. She heard his breathing, which sounded strange, as if he had just run up a flight of stairs. She looked down at the letter in her hands. It was definitely addressed to her. She slipped a finger under the flap and opened it.

Fat woman beware! You think that you are Number 1, but you are Number Nothing!

She read the letter in disbelief, in confusion. It was on the same paper as the last one; it was by the same hand. She looked up. Mr. Polopetsi was staring at the letter.

“I found it in the garage. I picked it up and was going to give it to you.”

She looked again at the piece of paper. Outside, it seemed as if the rain had intensified; there was an insistent drumming on the roof of the van. Watery sounds. “Found it?” she asked. “Where?”

He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then he said, “I found it on one of the oil drums. You know that one by the side. Somebody must have left it there. It is a wicked letter, Mma. It is from some stupid person who doesn’t know what he’s writing.”

Mma Ramotswe folded the letter up carefully and tucked it into her pocket. “You said
he,
Rra. Why did you say
he
? Why do you think this letter is from a man?”

Again he hesitated before replying. “Because the writers of such letters are usually men,” he said. “It is the sort of letter that a stupid man writes.”

She looked ahead and engaged the van’s gears slowly, tentatively, as if she was pondering something. “You didn’t know what was in it, did you, Rra?” she asked, looking at him as she spoke. The tiny white van strayed from its path, towards the middle of the road.

“Of course not, Mma,” said Mr. Polopetsi. “I would not read a letter addressed to
Mma Ramotswe.
”

Or write one? she asked herself.

CHAPTER SEVEN

LOOK, THE HEART IS BLEEDING

D
URING MMA RAMOTSWE’S ABSENCE
with Mr. Polopetsi, Mma Makutsi had spent her time tidying the office. It was a task that she always enjoyed, as she prided herself on being a ruthless disposer of unnecessary things. That was something that she had learned at the Botswana Secretarial College, where it had been stressed time and time again—almost to the point of becoming a mantra—
A tidy office is an efficient office.
And they had been given examples of real-life cases where untidiness in an office had led to disaster. One of these was that of a firm of quantity surveyors who had lost the contract for the construction of a large dam when the carefully prepared tender documents had gone missing in their notoriously untidy office. There had not been time to prepare another set before the deadline and the contract had gone to a rival. “Later on,” said the lecturer, “the documents were found under the chair of the head secretary. She had been sitting on them.”

That had brought laughter, even from Violet Sephotho, the undisputed ringleader of the glamorous girls in Mma Makutsi’s year; she, who normally heard very little of what was going on, so busy was she with the painting of her nails in the back row. She it was who had walked into a well-paid job with her miserable fifty-one per cent or whatever it was, while Mma Makutsi, with her distinguished record, had been turned down, sometimes with not so much as an interview.

No, Mma Makutsi was not one to clutter, and she had soon built up a small pile of things that she judged ready to go. There was a box of old pencils that Mma Ramotswe had salvaged, but never used; that would not be missed. There were several promotional writing pads, given to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni by a tyre salesman, that had been ignored on a shelf and were now yellowed with age. There were various items of evidence garnered in old investigations: a tie left behind in a room and then discovered by a suspicious husband; the tie of a paramour, a thin, brightly coloured tie, that
looked
guilty. “A man who would wear a tie like that could do
anything,
” Mma Ramotswe had observed.

Mma Makutsi gathered the items together and began to look around for something to put them in. Then she saw the rain clouds, and moved over to the window to look out at them. It was the sight that everybody was waiting for; the beginnings of a rainy season, they hoped, that would bring life to the land again. Rain was what mattered in Botswana—mattered above all else.

Mma Makutsi sent up a silent prayer. This season had to be good, or the level in the great dam that held Gaborone’s water would remain perilously low. And if that happened, there would be water rationing again and people’s gardens, such as they were, would wither and give up. But her prayer was not for Gaborone, but for the north, for her people up in Bobonong, who needed the rain more desperately than she did. For them, good rains meant fat cattle and sleek goats, not to mention good yields of sorghum for the making of flour.

And then it started. There was a wind and a movement in the trees, followed by the rain. Mma Makutsi saw the first drops hit the white earth of the garage yard, throwing up what looked like tiny worms of water and sand. Then these merged into one and became a silver shimmer of rapidly growing puddles; even the thirsty earth could not absorb this sudden munificence of water. She saw Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni running through the rain to his truck, sheltering his head with an old newspaper. He had urgent business to attend to, it seemed; a car stuck in the rain somewhere? A window left open at home and suddenly remembered—

The appalling thought struck her—the new bed—and she screamed. She had left her handsome new bed in the open, stacked against the side wall of the house, and now…She gave another cry and ran to the door. The two apprentices were standing near the front of the garage, watching the downpour. One of them, Charlie, was whittling away at a small stick with his penknife when Mma Makutsi called out as she ran towards him.

“Charlie! You have to drive me. I need to go home. Now. Right now.”

Charlie looked up from his whittling. “Why not wait? This will not last very long.” He made some additional remark to the younger apprentice, which Mma Makutsi did not hear properly but which sounded like, “I am not a taxi service.”

She bit her tongue. No, indeed, he was not a taxi service. He had been one, though, and had crashed the taxi on the first day, but she felt that it would not be helpful to mention that now.

“Please, Charlie,” she begged. “I have left something out in the rain. I have left a bed outside.”

Charlie smiled. “Then it will have become a water bed, Mma,” he said. “They are very fashionable and expensive. You have made one for nothing now.” He glanced at the younger apprentice for an appreciation of his wit. There was a smile of encouragement.

Mma Makutsi resisted the strong temptation to reach out and slap this annoying young man. “Charlie,” she said, “if you do not take me, I shall walk out in this storm and I will be struck by lightning. But before I walk out, I shall hide a note in the office saying,
If I become late—for any reason, even if it’s made to look like an act of God—it is Charlie’s fault.
”

The look of confidence on Charlie’s face faded. “They will know it was lightning—”

Mma Makutsi cut him off. “I can see that you are not a detective,” she said. “I can see that. How do you know that lightning has struck if nobody saw what happened? Lightning comes and goes—
bang,
like that.”

“You would be burned up,” said Charlie. “There would be big electricity marks.”

“Big electricity marks?” Mma Makutsi mocked. “And what are those, can you tell me?”

“Burns,” said Charlie.

Mma Makutsi was silent for a moment. Then she smiled the smile of one who knew something that another did not. “That’s what you think,” she said. “Well, it’s obvious that you have never dealt with a case of lightning. That is very obvious.” She said no more; she had not dealt with a case of lightning either, but how was Charlie to know that?

The younger apprentice looked nervous. “You should take Mma Makutsi, Charlie,” he urged. “I do not want her to be struck by lightning.”

“Thank you,” said Mma Makutsi. “I would not like that to happen to
you
either.” The
you
was pointed, and plainly excluded Charlie; it was clear that her concern as to the control of lightning damage was limited, and that beyond that the forces of nature could do their worst.

Charlie hesitated, and then reluctantly agreed. “We must go now, though, Mma,” he said. “We cannot stand about here discussing it.”

Again Mma Makutsi had to struggle to control herself. She had not asked for any discussion, and it was Charlie who had caused the delay. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “Thank you, Charlie,” she said. “You are very kind.” It was what Mma Ramotswe would probably have said, and she wondered, for a moment, if she was suddenly acquiring Mma Ramotswe’s patience. But no, she decided, she would never be as understanding as her employer, especially when it came to Charlie, who would try the patience of a saint, even if not that of Mma Ramotswe.

They ran out, ignoring the rain, and set off in Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s towing truck. “I’m sorry about your bed,” Charlie said. “I would not like you to think that I was not sorry for you, Mma.”

Mma Makutsi inclined her head. “Thank you. I feel very silly about it. I did not think it would rain today. I was not thinking.”

“Nobody knew that there would be rain,” said Charlie. “Everybody thought that it would go on being dry.”

“And we should never complain about rain,” said Mma Makutsi. “It would be a very dangerous thing for a Motswana to complain about rain.”

Charlie agreed; that would be unheard of. “This is very good rain,” he said, negotiating a small lake of floodwater that had built up beside the road.

Mma Makutsi said nothing. She was thinking of what she would find at the end of the journey, which she was sure would be a sodden mess. Oh, if only she had thought! Who would leave a bed, of all things, outside, exposed to the elements? Well, the answer to that was she would, as she had just done.

She directed Charlie down the narrow road that led to her house. Any hopes she might have cherished that the rain in this part of town might have been gentler were dashed by the sight of the large puddles of mud-brown water beside the road and, on occasion, on it. Although the rain itself was now easing off, there was no doubt that there had been as much of a downpour here as anywhere else; perhaps more.

“That is my house,” she said in a subdued tone, pointing it out to Charlie.

“It is a nice place, Mma,” said Charlie. “I wouldn’t mind living in a place like that. At the moment I’m staying…” He tailed off. They had both seen the bed at the same time, and were now staring at the drooping, sodden item propped up against the side of the house.

Mma Makutsi groaned. “It is ruined,” she said. “It is completely ruined.”

There was no sign of Charlie’s jaunty cheekiness as they alighted from the truck and walked up the small path that led to Mma Makutsi’s house.

“I’m so sorry, Mma,” said Charlie. “I don’t think the rain has done the bed any good. Was it an old one?”

Mma Makutsi stared at the bed that had been her pride and joy. “It was brand-new,” she said, her voice faltering with emotion. “It had never been slept in. Not once.”

Charlie poked at the surface of the velvet heart-shaped headboard. He did not exert much pressure, but the waterlogged cloth gave way under his finger, exposing sodden padding material behind. He picked at this, twisted it between his fingers, and then dropped it. “What is this red bit, Mma? Or should I say, what
was
it?”

“A heart,” muttered Mma Makutsi. “The headboard was a heart.”

“Why?” asked Charlie. “Why have a heart?”

Mma Makutsi did not answer. She had moved round to examine the side of the bed. The rain, she saw, had penetrated everywhere and there was a steady dripping of water from the lower edge of the mattress. She hardly dared raise her eyes to the velvet heart, but she did so now and saw that the water dripping from that part of the ruined bed was dyed red, as if it were blood. And she said to Charlie, in her sorrow, “Look, the heart is bleeding,” and he reached out and touched her lightly on the shoulder. It was an uncharacteristically sympathetic gesture from the young man, who was normally all jokes and showing-off, but who now, in the face of this little tragedy, proved himself capable of understanding, and did.