The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She stood up and stepped out from the shade.

  "It is hot," she called out. "Can you give me a drink of water?"

  The window closed and a moment or two later the kitchen door opened. Dr Komoti stood on the step wearing, she noticed, quite different clothes from those he had on when he left Gaborone. He had a mug of water in his hand, which he gave to her. Mma Ramotswe reached out and drank the water gratefully. She was, in fact, thirsty, and the water was welcome, although she noticed that the mug was dirty.

  "What are you doing in our garden?" said Dr Komoti, not unkindly. "Are you a thief?"

  Mma Ramotswe looked pained. "I am not," she said.

  Dr Komoti looked at her coolly. "Well, then, if you are not a thief, then what do you want? Are you looking for work? If so, we already have a woman who comes to cook in this house. We do not need anybody."

  Mma Ramotswe was about to utter her reply when somebody appeared behind Dr Komoti and looked out over his shoulder. It was Dr Komoti.

  "What's going on?" said the second Dr Komoti. "What does this woman want?"

  "I saw her in the garden," said the first Dr Komoti. "She tells me she isn't a thief."

  "And I certainly am not," she said indignantly. "I was looking at this house."

  The two men looked puzzled.

  "Why?" one of them asked. "Why would you want to look at this house? There's nothing special about it, and it's not for sale anyway."

  Mma Ramotswe tossed her head back and laughed. "Oh,

  I'm not here to buy it," she said. "It's just that I used to live here when I was a little girl. There were Boers living in it then, a Mr van der Heever and his wife. My mother was their cook, you see, and we lived in the servants' quarters back there at the end of the garden. My father kept the garden tidy ..."

  She broke off, and looked at the two men in reproach.

  "It was better in those days," she said. "The garden was well looked after."

  "Oh, I'm sure it was," said one of the two. "We'd like to get it under control one day. It's just that we're busy men. We're both doctors, you see, and we have to spend all our time in the hospital."

  "Ah!" said Mma Ramotswe, trying to sound reverential. "You are doctors here at the hospital?"

  "No," said the first Dr Komoti. "I have a surgery down near the railway station. My brother . . ."

  "I work up that way," said the other Dr Komoti, pointing vaguely to the north. "Anyway, you can look at the garden as much as you like, mother. You just go ahead. We can make you a mug of tea."

  "Ow!" said Mma Ramotswe. "You are very kind. Thank you."

  IT WAS a relief to get away from that garden, with its sinister undergrowth and its air of neglect. For a few minutes, Mma Ramotswe pretended to inspect the trees and the shrubs—or what could be seen of them—and then, thanking her hosts for the tea, she walked off down the road. Her mind busily turned over the curious information she had obtained. There were two Dr Komotis, which was nothing terribly unusual in itself; yet somehow she felt that this was the essence of the whole matter. There was no reason, of course, why there should not be twins who both went to medical school—twins often led mirrored lives, and sometimes even went so far as to marry the sister of the other's wife. But there was something particularly significant here, and Mma Ramotswe was sure that it was staring her in the face, if only she could begin to see it.

  She got into the tiny white van and drove back down the road towards the centre of town. One Dr Komoti had said that he had a surgery in town, near the railway station, and she decided to take a look at this—not that a brass plate, if he had one, would reveal a great deal.

  She knew the railway station slightly. It was a place that she enjoyed visiting, as it reminded her of the old Africa, the days of uncomfortable companionship on crowded trains, of slow journeys across great plains, of the sugarcane you used to eat to while away the time, and of the pith of the cane you used to spit out of the wide windows. Here you could still see it—or a part of it—here, where the trains that came up from the Cape pulled slowly past the platform on their journey up through Botswana to Bulawayo; here, where the Indian stores beside the railway buildings still sold cheap blankets and men's hats with a garish feather tucked into the band.

  Mma Ramotswe did not want Africa to change. She did not want her people to become like everybody else, soulless, selfish, forgetful of what it means to be an African, or, worse still, ashamed of Africa. She would not be anything but an African, never, even if somebody came up to her and said "Here is a pill, the very latest thing. Take it and it will make you into an American." She would say no. Never. No thank you.

  She stopped the white van outside the railway station and got out. There were a lot of people about; women selling roasted maize cobs and sweet drinks; men talking loudly to their friends; a family, travelling, with cardboard suitcases and possessions bundled up in a blanket. A child pushing a homemade toy car of twisted wire bumped into Mma Ramotswe and scurried off without an apology, frightened of rebuke.

  She approached one of the woman traders and spoke to her in Setswana.

  "Are you well today, Mma?" she said politely.

  "I am well, and you are well too, Mma?"

  "I am well, and I have slept very well."

  "Good."

  The greeting over, she said: "People tell me that there is a doctor here who is very good. They call him Dr Komoti. Do you know where his place is?"

  The woman nodded. "There are many people who go to that doctor. His place is over there, do you see, where that white man has just parked his truck. That's where he is."

  Mma Ramotswe thanked her informant and bought a cob of roasted maize. Then, tackling the cob as she walked, she walked across the dusty square to the rather dilapidated tin-roofed building where Dr Komoti's surgery was to be found.

  Rather to her surprise, the door was not locked, and when she pushed it open she found a woman standing directly in front of her.

  "I am sorry, the doctor isn't here, Mma," said the woman, slightly testily. "I am the nurse. You can see the doctor on Monday afternoon."

  "Ah!" said Mma Ramotswe. "It is a sad thing to have to tidy up on a Friday evening, when everybody else is thinking of going out."

  The nurse shrugged her shoulders. "My boyfriend is taking me out later on. But I like to get everything ready for Monday before the weekend starts. It is better that way."

  "Far better," Mma Ramotswe answered, thinking quickly. "I didn't actually want to see the doctor, or not as a patient. I used to work for him, you see, when he was up in Nairobi. I was a nurse on his ward. I wanted just to say hallo."

  The nurse's manner became markedly more friendly.

  "I'll make you some tea, Mma," she offered. "It is still quite hot outside."

  Mma Ramotswe sat down and waited for the nurse to return with the pot of tea.

  "Do you know the other Dr Komoti?" she said. "The brother?"

  "Oh yes," said the nurse. "We see a lot of him. He comes in here to help, you see. Two or three times a week."

  Mma Ramotswe lowered her cup, very slowly. Her heart thumped within her; she realised that she was at the heart of the matter now, the elusive solution within her grasp. But she would have to sound casual.

  "Oh, they did that up in Nairobi too," she said, waving her hand airily, as if these things were of little consequence. "One helped the other. And usually the patients didn't know that they were seeing a different doctor."

  The nurse laughed. "They do it here too," she said. "I'm not sure if it's quite fair on the patients, but nobody has realised that there are two of them. So everybody seems quite satisfied."

  Mma Ramotswe picked up her cup again and passed it for refilling. "And what about you?" she said. "Can you tell them apart?"

  The nurse handed the teacup back to Mma Ramotswe. "I can tell by one thing," she said. "One of them is quite good— the other's hopeless. The hopeless one knows hardly anything about medicine. If you ask me, it's a miracle that
he got through medical school."

  Mma Ramotswe thought, but did not say: He didn't.

  SHE STAYED in Mafikeng that night, at the Station Hotel, which was noisy and uncomfortable, but she slept well nonetheless, as she always did when she had just finished an enquiry. The next morning she shopped at the OK Bazaars and found, to her delight, that there was a rail of size 22 dresses on special offer. She bought three—two more than she really needed—but if you were the owner of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency you had to keep up a certain style.

  She was home by three o'clock that afternoon and she telephoned Dr Maketsi at his house and invited him to come immediately to her office to be informed of the results of her enquiry. He arrived within ten minutes and sat opposite her in the office, fiddling anxiously with the cuffs of his shirt.

  "First of all," announced Mma Ramotswe, "no drugs."

  Dr Maketsi breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank goodness for that," he said. "That's one thing I was really worried about."

  "Well," said Mma Ramotswe doubtfully. "I'm not sure if you're going to like what I'm going to tell you."

  "He's not qualified," gasped Dr Maketsi. "Is that it?"

  "One of them is qualified," said Mma Ramotswe.

  Dr Maketsi looked blank. "One of them?"

  Mma Ramotswe settled back in her chair with the air of one about to reveal a mystery.

  "There were once two twins," she began. "One went to medical school and became a doctor. The other did not. The one with the qualification got a job as a doctor, but was greedy and thought that two jobs as a doctor would pay better than one. So he took two jobs, and did both of them part-time. When he wasn't there, his brother, who was his identical twin, you'll recall, did the job for him. He used such medical knowledge as he had picked up from his qualified brother and no doubt also got advice from the brother as to what to do. And that's it. That's the story of Dr Komoti, and his twin brother in Mafikeng."

  Dr Maketsi sat absolutely silent. As Mma Ramotswe spoke he had sunk his head in his hands and for a moment she thought that he was going to cry.

  "So we've had both of them in the hospital," he said at last. "Sometimes we've had the qualified one, and sometimes we've had the twin brother."

  "Yes," said Mma Ramotswe simply. "For three days a week, say, you've had the qualified twin while the unqualified twin practised as a general practitioner in a surgery near Mafikeng Railway Station. Then they'd change about, and I assume that the qualified one would pick up any pieces which the unqualified one had left lying around, so to speak."

  "Two jobs for the price of one medical degree," mused Dr Maketsi. "It's the most cunning scheme I've come across for a long, long time."

  "I have to admit I was amazed by it," said Mma Ramotswe. "I thought that I'd seen all the varieties of human dishonesty, but obviously one can still be surprised from time to time."

  Dr Maketsi rubbed his chin.

  "I'll have to go to the police about this," he said. "There's going to have to be a prosecution. We have to protect the public from people like this."

  "Unless . . ." started Mma Ramotswe. Dr Maketsi grabbed at the straw he suspected she might be offering him.

  "Can you think of an alternative?" he asked. "Once this gets out, people will take fright. We'll have people encouraging others not to go to hospital. Our public health programmes rely on trust—you know how it is."

  "Precisely," said Mma Ramotswe. "I suggest that we transfer the heat elsewhere. I agree with you: the public has to be protected and Dr Komoti is going to have to be struck off, or whatever you people do. But why not get this done in somebody else's patch?"

  "Do you mean in Mafikeng?"

  "Yes," said Mma Ramotswe. "After all, an offence is being committed down there and we can let the South Africans deal with it. The papers up here in Gaborone probably won't even pick up on it. All that people here will know is that Dr Komoti resigned suddenly, which people often do—for all sorts of reasons."

  "Well," said Dr Maketsi. "I would rather like to keep the Minister's nose out of all this. I don't think it would help if he became . . . how shall we put it, upset?"

  "Of course it wouldn't help," said Mma Ramotswe. "With your permission I shall telephone my friend Billy Pilani, who's a police captain down there. He'd love to be seen to expose a bogus doctor. Billy likes a good, sensational arrest."

  "You do that," said Dr Maketsi, smiling. This was a tidy solution to a most extraordinary matter, and he was most impressed with the way in which Mma Ramotswe had handled it.

  "You know," he said, "I don't think that even my aunt in Mochudi could have dealt with this any better than you have."

  Mma Ramotswe smiled at her old friend. You can go through life and make new friends every year—every month practically—but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.

  She reached out and touched Dr Maketsi on the arm, gently, as old friends will sometimes do when they have nothing more to say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE WITCH DOCTOR'S WIFE

  A DUSTY track, hardly in use, enough to break the springs; a hill, a tumble of boulders, just as the sketch map drawn by Mr Charlie Gotso had predicted; and above, stretching from horizon to horizon, the empty sky, singing in the heat of noon. Mma Ramotswe steered the tiny white van cautiously, avoiding the rocks that could tear the sump from the car, wondering why nobody came this way. This was dead country; no cattle, no goats; only the bush and the stunted thorn trees. That anybody should want to live here, away from a village, away from human contact, seemed inexplicable. Dead country.

  Suddenly she saw the house, tucked away behind the trees, almost in the shadow of the hill. It was a bare earth house in the traditional style; brown mud walls, a few glassless windows, with a knee-height wall around the yard. A previous owner, a long time ago, had painted designs on the wall, but neglect and the years had scaled them off and only their ghosts remained.

  She parked the van and drew in her breath. She had faced down fraudsters; she had coped with jealous wives; she had even stood up to Mr Gotso; but this meeting would be different. This was evil incarnate, the heart of darkness, the root of shame. This man, for all his mumbo-jumbo and his spells, was a murderer.

  She opened the door and eased herself out of the van. The sun was riding high and its light prickled at her skin. They were too far west here, too close to the Kalahari, and her unease increased. This was not the comforting land she had grown up with; this was the merciless Africa, the waterless land.

  She made her way towards the house, and as she did so she felt that she was being watched. There was no movement, but eyes were upon her, eyes from within the house. At the wall, in accordance with custom, she stopped and called out, announcing herself.

  "I am very hot," she said. "I need water." There was no reply from within the house, but a rustle to her left, amongst the bushes. She turned round, almost guiltily, and stared. It was a large black beetle, a setotojane, with its horny neck, pushing at a minute trophy, some insect that had died of thirst perhaps. Little disasters, little victories; like ours, she thought; when viewed from above we are no more than setotojane. "Mma?"

  She turned round sharply. A woman was standing in the doorway, wiping her hands on a cloth.

  Mma Ramotswe stepped through the gateless break in the wall.

  "Dumela Mma," she said. "I am Mma Ramotswe." The woman nodded. "Eee. I am Mma Notshi." Mma Ramotswe studied her. She was a woman in her late fifties, or thereabouts, wearing a long skirt of the sort which the Herero women wore; but she was not Herero—she could tell.

  "I have come to see your husband," she said. "I have to ask him for something."

  The woman came out from the shadows and stood before Mma Ramotswe, peering at her face in a disconcerting way.

  "You have come for something? You want to buy something from him?"

  Mma Ramo
tswe nodded. "I have heard that he is a very good doctor. I have trouble with another woman. She is taking my husband from me and I want something that will stop her."

  The older woman smiled. "He can help you. Maybe he has something. But he is away. He is in Lobatse until Saturday. You will have to come back some time after that."

  Mma Ramotswe sighed. "This has been a long trip, and I am thirsty. Do you have water, my sister?"

  "Yes, I have water. You can come and sit in the house while you drink it."

  IT WAS a small room, furnished with a rickety table and two chairs. There was a grain bin in the corner, of the traditional sort, and a battered tin trunk. Mma Ramotswe sat on one of the chairs while the woman fetched a white enamel mug of water, which she gave to her visitor. The water was slightly rancid, but Mma Ramotswe drank it gratefully.

  Then she put the mug down and looked at the woman.

  "I have come for something, as you know. But I have also come to warn you of something."

  The woman lowered herself onto the other chair.

  "To warn me?"

  "Yes," said Mma Ramotswe. "I am a typist. Do you know what that is?"

  The woman nodded.

  "I work for the police," went on Mma Ramotswe. "And I have typed out something about your husband. They know that he killed that boy, the one from Katsana. They know that he is the man who took him and killed him for muti. They are going to arrest your husband soon and then they will hang him. I came to warn you that they will hang you also, because they say that you are involved in it too. They say that you did it too. I do not think they should hang women. So I came to tell you that you could stop all this quickly if you came with me to the police and told them what happened. They will believe you and you will be saved. Otherwise, you will die very soon. Next month, I think."

  She stopped. The other woman had dropped the cloth she had been carrying and was staring at her, wide-eyed. Mma Ramotswe knew the odour of fear—that sharp, acrid smell that people emit through the pores of their skin when they are frightened; now the torpid air was heavy with that smell.