Alexander McCall Smith - Tears of the Giraffe

The third figure, Oswald Ranta, was another matter altogether. He was a well-dressed, dapper figure. He was wearing a white shirt and tie and, like Mma Soloi, was smiling at the camera. His smile, though, was very different.

"Look at that man," said Mma Ramotswe. "Look at Ranta."

"I do not like him," said Mma Makutsi. "I do not like the look of him at all."

"Precisely," said Mma Ramotswe. "That man is evil."

Mma Makutsi said nothing, and for a few minutes the two of them sat in total silence, Mma Makutsi staring at the photograph and Mma Ramotswe looking down into her mug of tea. Then Mma Ramotswe spoke.

"I think that if anything bad was done in that place, then it was done by that man. Do you think I am right?"

"Yes," said Mma Makutsi. "You are right." She paused.

"Are you going to find him now?"

"That is my next task," said Mma Ramotswe. "I shall ask around and see if anybody knows this man. But in the meantime, we have some letters to write, Mma. We have other cases to think about. That man at the brewery who was anxious about his brother. I have found out something now and we can write to him. But first we must write a letter about that accountant."

Mma Makutsi inserted a piece of paper into her typewriter and waited for Mma Ramotswe to dictate. The letter was not an interesting one-it was all about the tracing of a company accountant who had sold most of the company's assets and then disappeared. The police had stopped looking for him but the company wanted to trace its property.

Mma Makutsi typed automatically. Her mind was not on the task, but her training enabled her to type accurately even if she was thinking about something else. Now she was thinking of Oswald Ranta, and of how they might trace him. The spelling of Ranta was slightly unusual, and the simplest thing would be to look the name up in the telephone directory. Oswald Ranta was a smart-looking man who could be expected to have a telephone. All she had to do was to look him up and write down the address. Then she could go and make her own enquiries, if she wished, and present Mma Ramotswe with the information.

The letter finished, she passed it over to Mma Ramotswe for signature and busied herself with addressing the envelope. Then, while Mma Ramotswe made a note in the file, she slipped open her drawer and took out the Botswana telephone directory. As she had thought, there was only one Oswald Ranta.

"I must make a quick telephone call," she said. "I shall only be a moment."

Mma Ramotswe grunted her assent. She knew that Mma Makutsi could be trusted with the telephone, unlike most secretaries, who she knew used their employers' telephones to make all sorts of long-distance calls to boyfriends in remote places like Maun or Orapa.

Mma Makutsi spoke in a low voice, and Mma Ramotswe did not hear her.

"Is Rra Ranta there, please?"

"He is at work, Mma. I am the maid."

"I'm sorry to bother you, Mma. I must phone him at work. Can you tell me where that is?"

"He is at the University. He goes there every day."

"I see. Which number there?"

She noted it down on a piece of paper, thanked the maid, and replaced the receiver. Then she dialled, and again her pencil scratched across paper.

"Mma Ramotswe," she said quietly. "I have all the information you need."

Mma Ramotswe looked up sharply, "Information about what?"

"Oswald Ranta. He is living here in Gaborone. He is a lecturer in the Department of Rural Economics in the University. The secretary there says that he always comes in at eight o'clock every morning and that anybody who wishes to see him can make an appointment. You need not look any further."

Mma Ramotswe smiled.

"You are a very clever person," she said. "How did you find all this out?"

"I looked in the telephone directory," answered Mma Makutsi. "Then I telephoned to find out about the rest."

"I see," said Mma Ramotswe, still smiling. "That was very good detective work."

Mma Makutsi beamed at the praise. Detective work. She had done the job of a detective, although she was only a secretary.

"I am happy that you are pleased with my work," she said, after a moment. "I have wanted to be a detective. I'm happy being a secretary, but it is not the same thing as being a detective."

Mma Ramotswe frowned. "This is what you have wanted?"

"Every day," said Mma Makutsi. "Every day I have wanted this thing."

Mma Ramotswe thought about her secretary. She was a good worker, and intelligent, and if it meant so much to her, then why should she not be promoted? She could help her with her investigations, which would be a much better use of her time than sitting at her desk waiting for the telephone to ring. They could buy an answering machine to deal with calls if she was out of the office on an investigation. Why not give her the chance and make her happy?

"You shall have the thing you have wanted," said Mma Ramotswe. "You will be promoted to assistant detective. As from tomorrow."

Mma Makutsi rose to her feet. She opened her mouth to speak, but the emotion within her strangled any words. She sat down.

"I am glad that you are pleased," said Mma Ramotswe. "You have broken the glass ceiling that stops secretaries from reaching their full potential."

Mma Makutsi looked up, as if to search for the ceiling that she had broken. There were only the familiar ceiling boards, fly-tracked and buckling from the heat. But the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel itself could not at that moment have been more glorious in her eyes, more filled with hope and joy.

ALONE IN her house in Zebra Drive, Mma Ramotswe awoke, as she often did, in the small hours of the morning, that time when the town was utterly silent; the time of maximum danger for rats, and other small creatures, as cobras and mam-bas moved silently in their hunting. She had always suffered from broken sleep, but had stopped worrying about it. She never lay awake for more than an hour or so, and, since she retired to bed early, she always managed at least seven hours of sleep a night. She had read that people needed eight hours, and that the body eventually claimed its due. If that were so, then she made up for it, as she often slept for several hours on a Saturday and never got up early on Sunday. So an hour or so lost at two or three each morning was nothing significant.

Recently, while waiting to have her hair braided at the Make Me Beautiful Salon she had noticed a magazine article on sleep. There was a famous doctor, she read, who knew all about sleep and had several words of advice for those whose sleep was troubled. This Dr Shapiro had a special clinic just for people who could not sleep and he attached wires to their heads to see what was wrong. Mma Ramotswe was intrigued: there was a picture of Dr Shapiro and a sleepy-looking man and woman, in dishevelled pyjamas, with a tangle of wires coming from their heads. She felt immediately sorry for them: the woman, in particular, looked miserable, like somebody who was being forced to participate in an immensely tedious procedure but who simply could not escape. Or was she miserable because of the hospital pyjamas, in which she was being photographed; she may always have wished to have her photograph in a magazine, and now her wish was to be fulfilled-in hospital pyjamas.

And then she read on, and became outraged. "Fat people often have difficulty in sleeping well," the article went on. "They suffer from a condition called sleep apnoea, which means that their breathing is interrupted in sleep. Such people are advised to lose weight."

Advised to lose weight! What has weight to do with it? There were many fat people who seemed to sleep perfectly well; indeed, there was a fat person who often sat under a tree outside Mma Ramotswe's house and who seemed to be asleep most of the time. Would one advise that person to lose weight? It seemed to Mma Ramotswe as if such advice would be totally unnecessary and would probably simply lead to unhap-piness. From being a fat person who was comfortably placed in the shade of a tree, this poor person would become a thin person, with not much of a bottom to sit upon, and probably unable to sleep as a result.