The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection: No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (13) (14 page)

“I was just wondering about what it meant to say that I have a good Botswana face.”

“It means that you have the best sort of face,” said Mma Soleti, finishing her examination. “Botswana faces are honest faces. There are some faces that are very different, I’m afraid. Those people have faces that are full of anger or anxiety or all those things—negative things.”

“I see.”

“Yes, Mma. That is what I meant.” She lowered the magnifying glass and sat down opposite Mma Ramotswe. “Now, Mma,” she continued, “we need to talk about your skin. There are some big holes in it.”

Mma Ramotswe gasped. “Holes in my skin?”

Mma Soleti reached out and took her hand. “Don’t worry, my
sister. They are just what we call enlarged pores. They are normal. Most people have some enlarged pores. They let grease out. Very greasy people have many of them; people who are not so greasy do not have so many.”

“That’s a relief, Mma.”

“Yes,” said Mma Soleti. “You need not worry. Your skin is actually very good. But we can do something to make those enlarged pores go away. There are some cleansers that we can use to get all the impurities out, and then the skin will take care of itself.”

The beautician rose from her chair and opened the cupboard behind her. Leaning forward to read the labels, after a few minutes she chose a jar with a white and silver label. “This is very good,” she said. “If you apply this at night before you go to bed, it will do its work while you are asleep. Many of my customers have been made very happy by this cream.”

Mma Ramotswe took the open jar from Mma Soleti and sniffed at it. She liked the smell. “I suppose there’s no harm in trying …”

“No harm at all,” said Mma Soleti, taking the jar back from her and slipping it into a paper bag. “You are very wise, Mma. That will last you for maybe one month. Then you can get some more.”

The cream was less expensive than Mma Ramotswe had feared. She paid, and then accepted Mma Soleti’s offer of a cup of tea. Her favourable impression of the beautician had grown stronger, and she did not resent the purchase she had been rather press-ganged into making. But now, she decided, she might get her share of benefit from the encounter.

“You have many clients, Mma?” she asked.

Mma Soleti nodded. “More than ever, Mma. This month was busier than last month, and last month was busier than the month before.”

“You must see everything, Mma. In this job of yours you must see everything.”

Mma Soleti looked at her sideways. “Are you asking me that as a private detective, Mma? Is that why you are asking?”

She’s clever, thought Mma Ramotswe; this woman understands. “As a detective,” she confessed.

“You’re very honest, Mma. I like that.”

Mma Ramotswe waited for her question to be answered.

“So, I see everything? Well, yes, I think I do. I see and hear a lot.” She paused. “Is there anything in particular you want to know, Mma?”

Mma Ramotswe was not prepared for this. She had not intended to ask any direct questions—at least not at this stage—and she was not sure what to say. But then she thought: Mr. Ditso.

“There’s a man we’re interested in at the moment,” she said. “He’s called Ditso. You will have heard of him, Mma?”

The effect of the question was immediate, and Mma Ramotswe wondered whether she had inadvertently asked about Mma Soleti’s cousin. There was a presumption in Botswana, she had discovered, that if you talked to one person about another, then the two persons in question would be cousins, or even brother and sister; she had proved that time and time again. And that meant you had to be very careful.

“Are you related to that man?” she asked Mma Soleti.

The beautician shook her head vigorously. “I have never met him. But I know one thing about him, Mma. I know one thing that maybe I shouldn’t talk about.”

Mma Ramotswe made a sympathetic noise. “It’s generally better to talk, Mma. It’s not good to bottle things up.”

Mma Soleti seemed only too ready for this advice. “I shall tell you then, Mma. My sister is a beautician too, Mma. Actually, she is my half-sister, and she does sessions at that nail place, you know, near the post office. She is very good. She has a diploma in nail care from Durban. She went down there to get it. It was very expensive
going all the way to South Africa, but she said it was worthwhile. Now she does very well.”

“Time spent on getting qualifications is never wasted,” said Mma Ramotswe.

“You have qualifications in detection, no doubt,” said Mma Soleti. “Are they hard to get? I can imagine they would be.”

Mma Ramotswe sighed. “I have no qualifications, Mma.”

Mma Soleti stared at her in surprise. “You mean any old person can go and put a sign up saying that she is a private detective? Is that true, Mma?”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. “But I have done a lot of studying,” she said. “There is a very good book, you see.
The Principles of Private Detection
.” She paused; she was not boastful, but there were some temptations that were irresistible, and this, she decided, was one. “I know the author, you see, Mma.” Immediately she regretted it, and added: “Not very well, though. I could not really call him a friend.”

She need not have worried. If Mma Soleti were to be impressed, then it was not to be by the mention of a mere author. “People write books,” she said casually. “I have had people in here who are thinking of writing a book.”

Mma Ramotswe gently nudged the conversation back in the direction that she wanted it to follow. “Your sister, Mma …”

Mma Soleti remembered. “Of course, yes, my sister: she has that nail place near the post office in town. She is very busy with people’s nails, and gets many people coming in to see her. Sometimes it is almost too late to do much for them, as they have neglected their nails.” Her gaze moved to Mma Ramotswe’s nails, and was noticed. Mma Ramotswe glanced down too: she did not use nail varnish, although there was a bottle of it somewhere, unless Motholeli had been playing with it, which was very likely. But there was nothing essentially wrong with her nails, she believed; they did
what they were supposed to do, which was … What were nails meant to do?

“So all sorts of people come in,” continued Mma Soleti. “And she says that one of the women who come in to have their nails done is the secret sweetheart of that man, that rich man you mentioned. She is secret because he has a wife, and the wife comes in to have her nails done too! My sister has to make sure that their appointments don’t overlap. Can you imagine that, Mma? That would not be very good, I think.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. She wanted to hear more of this story, but she did not want to probe too obviously; in her experience, people could suddenly dry up if you became too insistent in your questioning. “Oh well,” she said. “Men are often doing that, Mma.”

“They are, my sister,” said Mma Soleti. “But I do not always blame men, you know. They are very weak, and there are some women who are prepared to take advantage of that weakness.” She looked knowingly at Mma Ramotswe, as if to imply that should she wish it, she could provide a long list of such women.

“That is very true,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I have known some bad women in my work.” She paused, and looked out of the tin building’s small window—a patch of sky, cloudless and innocent, blue. There was no glass between her and that sky; the window must be secured by a shutter that had been opened. There had to be a shutter: you could not leave all those potions and creams unguarded, she thought; greasy people, open-pored, walking past, might seize the opportunity to help themselves to skin cleansers … “Who is this woman, Mma? Do you know her?”

Mma Soleti shook her head. “She did not give my sister her name. She just calls herself by some name that my sister thinks she has invented. She actually forgot one time what she had called herself before.”

“I do not think you forget your own name,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Not normally.”

“No.”

“Even if you are very busy …”

“No. Not even then.”

Mma Ramotswe asked a final question. “And you know nothing else about her, Mma?”

Mma Soleti appeared to consider this for a few moments. “The only thing my sister said is that she is one of those women who are always looking out for men. You know the type? She is not interested in talking to women.”

Mma Ramotswe knew exactly what Mma Soleti meant. There was a certain sort of woman who was always aware of which men were in the vicinity and was always very attentive to them, but who would neither notice women nor bother to speak to them. Women like Violet Sephotho, for instance …

M
MA POTOKWANE
was not in her office when Mma Ramotswe arrived at the orphan farm. This was not unusual: the matron was often to be found in one of the outlying buildings, attending to one of the numerous minor, or sometimes major, problems that might be expected to crop up in the day-to-day life of an orphanage. Most of these she resolved herself, dispensing advice, fixing something, or simply wiping away tears; all of which she did with the same brisk confidence that she applied to any task that confronted her. Not for nothing had Mma Potokwane previously been appointed as matron of a small but well-run hospital, and the skills she had learned in the wards there—dealing with unhappy or nervous patients, keeping nurses and others on their toes—she now applied in the rather different circumstances of the orphan farm.

Mma Ramotswe, still thinking of her conversation with her new acquaintance, Mma Soleti, parked her tiny white van under the tree that always shaded it on her visits: a towering jacaranda tree on the lower limbs of which the children had climbed, rubbing the bark bare with their legs. We should all have a tree in our childhood, she thought—a tree one might explore, a tree from which
one might learn how to fall. She had fallen out of just such a tree as a girl and winded herself, while the children who were with her stood in a circle about her and laughed; they were boys, of course, and found misfortune funny in a way in which girls did not. She had never forgotten the sensation of being winded: of having all the breath knocked out of you and waiting for your lungs to draw it back in—but it was as if your lungs were stunned and were waiting for instructions from you …

She made her way to the verandah that lined the building in which Mma Potokwane had her office. The door leading off into the office was open, and she could see that nobody was within. A fan had been left on, though, and was whirring away industriously. That meant that Mma Potokwane would not be far away—a counter of thebes every bit as much as pula, she would not waste electricity for long. Many of the goods supplied to the orphan farm she begged and borrowed from businessmen in the town, but you could not do that with electricity. There was no human face to the electricity board, no manager whom one could negotiate a lower price with or sweet-talk with a promise of some future favour. The electricity board charged a set amount for electricity, and if you used it, you had to pay for it. There was no way round that, as there was with other bills.
You can’t be charging the poor orphans that much
was one of Mma Potokwane’s favourite lines, regularly invoked against traders who supplied the orphan farm with its needs, and it was often highly successful. But you could not say that to an electricity board that had no shame, no sense of what it was like to be an orphan.

Mma Ramotswe decided to go in search of the matron rather than stay in her office and wait for her to return. She did not like to sit unattended in another’s office—even if invited, explicitly or implicitly. There was always the feeling, she thought, that the person whose office it was would think that you had sneaked a look at
the papers on the desk, which was what some inquisitive people did, no matter how hard it was to read upside down. And that notion reminded her of Clovis Andersen, who had written—had he not?—in
The Principles of Private Detection
, something about learning to read upside down. It came back to her now, from that section of the book that dealt with the skills that a good detective should try to master. “Being able to read in a poor light puts one at a great advantage over those who cannot,” he wrote. “There have been many occasions when I have been able to glean information from a document which would be too poorly lit to be legible to most. And the same ability has seen me safely through a number of tricky, not to say perilous, situations.” And what, she wondered, were those? Now she could ask him, of course, although he would only be able to tell her about them as long as disclosure on his part would not compromise the strict rules of confidentiality that he set out elsewhere in the book.

Then had come the section on reading upside down. “Now there can be no doubt,” he wrote—and how she loved that phrase,
there can be no doubt;
how assured it was, how definitive—“Now there can be no doubt but that being able to read upside down is extremely useful and is, in fact, a skill well worth mastering. It enables you to read a document that lies before the person on the other side of the desk from you. They may think that you cannot read it; they may think that they can tell you what is in the document without your being able to verify their version. But they reckon without your ability to read upside down!”