Alexander McCall Smith - Tears of the Giraffe

"Too selfish," remarked Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

"That's exactly what I was thinking," said Mma Ramotswe.

She opened the door of the van and manoeuvred herself out. The van was slightly too small for a lady like herself, of traditional build, but she was fond of it and dreaded the day when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would be able to fix it no longer. No modern van, with all its gadgets and sophistication, would be able to take the place of the tiny white van. Since she had acquired it eleven years previously, it had borne her faithfully on her every journey, putting up with the heights of the October heat, or the fine dust which at certain times of year drifted in from the Kalahari and covered everything with a red-brown blanket. Dust was the enemy of engines, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had explained-on more than one occasion-the enemy of engines, but the friend of the hungry mechanic.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni watched Mma Ramotswe approach the front door and knock. Dr Ranta must have been waiting for her, as she was quickly admitted and the door was closed behind her.

"Is it just yourself, Mma?" said Dr Ranta. "Is your friend out there coming in?"

"No," she said. "He will wait for me outside." Dr Ranta laughed. "Security? So you feel safe?" She did not answer his question. "You have a nice house," she said. "You are fortunate."

He gestured for her to follow him into the living room. Then he pointed to a chair and he himself sat down.

"I don't want to waste my time talking to you," he said. "I will speak only because you have threatened me and I am experiencing some difficulty with some lying women. That is the only reason why I am talking to you."

His pride was hurt, she realised. He had been cornered- and by a woman, too; a stinging humiliation for a womaniser. There was no point in preliminaries, she thought, and so she went straight to the point.

"How did Michael Curtin die?" she asked. He sat in his chair, directly opposite her, his lips pursed. "I worked there," he said, appearing to ignore her question. "I was a rural economist and they had been given a grant by the Ford Foundation to employ somebody to do studies of the economics of these small-scale agricultural ventures. That was my job. But I knew that things were hopeless. Right from the start. Those people were just idealists. They thought that you could change the way things had always been. I knew it wouldn't work."

"But you accepted the money," said Mma Ramotswe, He stared at her contemptuously. "It was a job. I am a professional economist. I study things that work and things that don't work. Maybe you don't understand that."

"I understand," she said.

"Well," he went on. "We-the management, so to speak- lived in one large house. There was a German who was in charge of it-a man from Namibia, Burkhardt Fischer. He had a wife, Marcia, and then there was a South African woman, Carla Smit, the American boy and myself.

"We all got on quite well, except that Burkhardt did not like me. He tried to get rid of me shortly after I arrived, but I had a contract from the Foundation and they refused. He told lies about me, but they didn't believe him.

"The American boy was very polite. He spoke reasonable Setswana and people liked him. The South African woman took to him and they started to share the same room. She did everything for him-cooked his food, washed his clothes, and made a great fuss of him. Then she started to get interested in me. I didn't encourage her, but she had an affair with me, while she was still with that boy. She said to me that she was going to tell him, but that she didn't want to hurt his feelings. So we saw one another secretly, which was difficult to do out there, but we managed.

"Burkhardt suspected what was happening and he called me into his office and threatened that he would tell the American boy if I did not stop seeing Carla. I told him that it was none of his business, and he became angry. He said that he was going to write to the Foundation again and say that I was disrupting the work of the collective. So I told him that I would stop seeing Carla.

"But I did not. Why should I? We met one another in the evenings. She said that she liked going for walks in the bush in the dark; he did not like this, and he stayed. He warned her about going too far and about looking out for wild animals and snakes.

"We had a place where we went to be alone together. It was a hut beyond the fields. We used it for storing hoes and string and things like that. But it was also a good place for lovers to meet.

"That night we were in the hut together. There was a full moon, and it was quite light outside. I suddenly realised that somebody was outside the hut and I got up. I crept to the door and opened it very slowly. The American boy was outside. He was wearing just a pair of shorts and his veldschoens. It was a very hot night.

"He said: 'What are you doing here?' I said nothing, and he suddenly pushed past me and looked into the hut. He saw Carla there, and of course he knew straightaway.

"At first he did not say anything. He just looked at her and then he looked at me. Then he began to run away from the hut. But he did not run back towards the house, but in the opposite direction, out into the bush.

"Carla shouted for me to go after him, and so I did. He ran quite fast, but I managed to catch up with him and I grabbed him by the shoulder. He pushed me off, and got away again. I followed him, even through thorn bushes, which were scratching at my legs and arms. I could easily have caught one of those thorns in my eye, but I did not. It was very dangerous.

"I caught him again, and this time he could not struggle so hard. I put my arms around him, to calm him down so that we could get him back to the house, but he fell away from me and he stumbled.

"We were at the edge of a deep ditch, a donga, that ran through the bush there. It was about six feet deep, and as he stumbled he fell down into the ditch. I looked down and saw him lying there on the ground. He did not move at all and he was making no sound.

"I climbed down and looked at him. He was quite still, and when I tried to look at his head to see if he had hurt it, it lolled sideways in my hand. I realised that he had broken his neck in the fall and that he was no longer breathing.

"I ran back to Carla and told her what had happened. She came with me back to the donga and we looked at him again. He was obviously dead, and she started to scream.

"When she had stopped screaming, we sat down there in the ditch and wondered what to do. I thought that if we went back and reported what had happened, nobody would believe that he had slipped by accident. I imagined that people would say that he and I had had a fight after he discovered that I was seeing his girlfriend. I knew, in particular, that if the police spoke to Burkhardt, he would say bad things about me and would tell them that I had probably killed him. It would have looked very bad for me.

"So we decided to bury the body and to say that we knew nothing about it. I knew that there were anthills nearby; the bush there is full of them, and I knew that this was a good place to get rid of a body. I found one quite easily, and I was lucky. An anteater had made quite a large hole in the side of one of the mounds, and I was able to enlarge this slightly and then put the body in. Then I stuffed in stones and earth and swept around the mound with a branch of a thorn tree. I think that I must have covered all traces of what had happened, because the tracker that they got in picked up nothing. Also, there was rain the next day, and that helped to hide any signs.

"The police asked us questions over the next few days, and there were other people, too. I told them that I had not seen him that evening, and Carla said the same thing. She was shocked, and became very quiet. She did not want to see me anymore, and she spent a lot of her time crying.