Tears of the Giraffe tnlda-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked sideways at Mma Ramotswe. There was something on her mind. In a marriage, he thought, it would be important not to keep anything from one's spouse, and they might as well start that policy now. Mind you, he recalled that he had just kept the knowledge of two foster children from Mma Ramotswe, which was hardly a minor matter, but that was over now and a new policy could begin.

  "Mma Ramotswe," he ventured. "You are uneasy tonight. Is it something I have said?"

  She put down her teacup, glancing at her watch as she did so.

  "It's nothing to do with you," she said. "I have to go and speak to somebody tonight. It's about Mma Curtin's son. I am worried about this person I have to see."

  She told him of her fears. She explained that although she knew that it was highly unlikely that an economist at the University of Botswana would turn to violence, nonetheless she felt convinced of the evil in his character, and this made her profoundly uneasy.

  "There is a word for this sort of person," she explained. "I read about them. He is called a psychopath. He is a man with no morality."

  He listened quietly, his brow furrowed with concern. Then, when she had finished speaking, he said: "You cannot go. I cannot have my future wife walking into danger like that."

  She looked at him. "It makes me very pleased to know that you are worried about me," she said. "But I have my calling, which is that of a private detective. If I was going to be frightened, I should have done something else."

  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked unhappy. "You do not know this man. You cannot go to his house, just like that. If you insist, then I shall come too. I shall wait outside. He need not know I am there."

  Mma Ramotswe pondered. She did not want Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to fret, and if his presence outside would relieve his anxiety, then there was no reason why he should not come.

  "Very well," she said. "You wait outside. We'll take my van. You can sit there while I am talking to him."

  "And if there is any emergency," he said, "you can shout. I shall be listening."

  They both finished the meal in a more relaxed frame of mind. Motholeli was reading to her brother in his bedroom, the children having had their evening meal earlier. Dinner over, while Mr J.L.B. Matekoni took the plates through to the kitchen, Mma Ramotswe went down the corridor to find the girl half-asleep herself, the book resting on her knee. Puso was still awake, but drowsy, one arm across his chest, the other hanging down over the edge of the bed. She moved his arm back onto the bed and he smiled at her sleepily.

  "It is time for you to go to bed too," she said to the girl. "Mr J.L.B. Matekoni tells me that you have had a busy day repairing engines."

  She wheeled Motholeli back to her own room, where she helped her out of the chair and onto the side of the bed. She liked to have her independence, and so she allowed her to undress herself unaided and to get into the new nightgown that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had bought for her on the shopping trip. It was the wrong colour, thought Mma Ramotswe, but then it had been chosen by a man, who could not be expected to know about these things.

  "Are you happy here, Motholeli?" she asked.

  "I am so happy," said the girl. "And every day my life is getting happier."

  Mma Ramotswe tucked the sheet about her and planted a kiss on her cheek. Then she turned out the light and left the room. Every day I am getting happier. Mma Ramotswe wondered whether the world which this girl and her brother would inherit would be better than the world in which she and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had grown up. They had grown happier, she thought, because they had seen Africa become independent and take its own steps in the world. But what a troubled adolescence the continent had experienced, with its vainglorious dictators and their corrupt bureaucracies. And all the time, African people were simply trying to lead decent lives in the midst of all the turmoil and disappointment. Did the people who made all the decisions in this world, the powerful people in places like Washington and London, know about people like Motholeli and Puso? Or care? She was sure that they would care, if only they knew. Sometimes she thought that people overseas had no room in their heart for Africa, because nobody had ever told them that African people were just the same as they were. They simply did not know about people like her Daddy, Obed Ramotswe, who stood, proudly attired in his shiny suit, in the photograph in her living room.

  You had no grandchildren, she said to the photograph, but now you have. Two. In this house.

  The photograph was mute. He would have loved to have met the children, she thought. He would have been a good grandfather, who would have shown them the old Botswana morality and brought them to an understanding of what it is to live an honourable life. She would have to do that now; she and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. One day soon she would drive out to the orphan farm and thank Mma Silvia Potokwane for giving them the children. She would also thank her for everything that she did for all those other orphans, because, she suspected, nobody ever thanked her for that. Bossy as Mma Potokwane might be, she was a matron, and it was a matron's job to be like that, just as detectives should be nosy, and mechanics... Well, what should mechanics be? Greasy? No, greasy was not quite right. She would have to think further about that.

  "I WILL be ready," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, his voice lowered, although there was no need. "You will know that I am here. Right here, outside the house. If you shout out, I will hear you."

  They studied the house, in the dim light of the streetlamp, an undistinguished building with a standard red-tiled roof and unkempt garden.

  "He obviously does not employ a gardener," observed Mma Ramotswe. "Look at the mess."

  It was inconsiderate not to have a gardener if, like Dr Haiiiu, you were in a well-paid white-collar job. It was a social duly In employ domestic staff, who were readily available and desperate for work. Wages were low-unconscionably so, thought Mma Ramotswe-but at least the system created jobs. II everybody with a job had a maid, then that was food going into the mouths of the maids and their children. If everybody did their own housework and tended their own gardens, then what were the people who were maids and gardeners to do?

  By not cultivating his garden, Dr Ranta showed himself to be selfish, which did not surprise Mma Ramotswe at all.

  "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.

  "Then Carla left. She spoke to me briefly before she went, and she told me that she was sorry that she had become involved with me. She also told me that she was pregnant, but that the baby was his, not mine because she must already have been pregnant by the time she and I started seeing one another. "She left, and then I left one month later. I was given a scholarship to Duke; she left the country. She did not want to go back to South Africa, which she didn't like. I heard that she went up to Zimbabwe, to Bulawayo, and that she took a job running a small hotel there. I heard the other day that she is still there. Somebody I know was in Bulawayo and he said that he had seen her in the distance."

  He stopped and looked at Mma Ramotswe. "That is the truth, Mma," he said. "I didn't kill him. I have told you the truth."

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. "I can tell that," she said. "I can tell that you were not lying." She paused. "I am not going to say anything to the police. I told you that, and I do not go back on my word. But I am going to tell the mother what happened, provided that she makes the same promise to me-that she will not go to the police, and I think that she will give me that promise. I do not see any point in the police reopening the case."

  It was clear that Dr Ranta was relieved. His expression of hostility had gone now, and he seemed to be seeking some sort of reassurance from her.

  "And those girls," he said. "They won't make trouble for me?"

  Mma Ramotswe shook her head. "There will be no trouble from them. You need not worry about that."

  "What about that statement?" he asked. "The one from that other girl? Will you destroy it?"

  Mma Ramotswe rose to her feet and moved towards the door.

  "That statement?"

  "Yes," he said. "The statement about me from the girl who was lying."

  Mma Ramotswe opened the front door and looked out. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was sitting in the car and looked up when the front door was opened.

  She stepped down onto the pathway.

  "Well, Dr Ranta," she said quietly. "I think that you are a man who has lied to a lot of people, particularly, I think, to women. Now something has happened which you may not have had happen to you before. A woman has lied to you and you have fallen for it entirely. You will not like that, but maybe it will
teach you what it is to be manipulated. There was no girl."

  She walked down the path and out of the gate. He stood at the door watching her, but she knew that he would not dare do anything. When he got over the anger which she knew he would be feeling, he would reflect that she had let him off lightly, and, if he had the slightest vestige of a conscience he might also be grateful to her for setting to rest the events of ten years ago. But she had her doubts about his conscience, and she thought that this, on balance, might be unlikely.

  As for her own conscience: she had lied to him and she had resorted to blackmail. She had done so in order to obtain information which she otherwise would not have got. But again that troubling issue of means and ends raised its head. Was it right to do the wrong thing to get the right result? Yes, it must be. There were wars which were just wars. Africa had been obliged to fight to liberate itself, and nobody said that it was wrong to use force to achieve that result. Life was messy, and sometimes there was no other way. She had played Dr Ranta at his own game, and had won, just as she had used deception to defeat that cruel witch doctor in her earlier case. It was regrettable, but necessary in a world that was far from perfect.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BULAWAYO

  LEAVING EARLY, with the town barely stirring and the sky still in darkness, she drove in the tiny white van out onto the Fran-cistown Road. Just before she reached the Mochudi turnoff, where the road ambled down to the source of the Limpopo, the sun began to rise above the plains, and for a few minutes, the whole world was a pulsating yellow-gold-the kopjes, the panoply of the treetops, last season's dry grass beside the road, the very dust. The sun, a great red ball, seemed to hang above the horizon and then freed itself and floated up over Africa; the natural colours of the day returned, and Mma Ramotswe saw in the distance the familiar roofs of her childhood, and the donkeys beside the road, and the houses dotted here and there among the trees.