She reread the entry and then looked at the attorney's letter. The dates tallied: 'My client says that the accident occurred on 10th May last. He attended at the Princess Marina Hospital the following day. The wound was dressed, but osteomyelitis set in. The following week surgery was performed and the damaged finger was amputated at the proximal phalangeal joint (see attached hospital report). My client claims that this accident was due entirely to your negligence in failing adequately to fence working parts of machinery operated in your factory and has instructed me to raise an action for damages on his behalf. It would clearly be in the interests of all concerned if this action were to be settled promptly and my client has accordingly been advised that the sum of four thousand pula will be acceptable to him in lieu of court-awarded damages.'
Mma Ramotswe read the remainder of the letter, which as far as she could make out was meaningless jargon which the attorney had been taught at law school. They were impossible, these people; they had a few years of lectures at the University of Botswana and they set themselves up as experts on everything. What did they know of life? All they knew was how to parrot the stock phrases of their profession and to continue to be obstinate until somebody, somewhere, paid up. They won by attrition in most cases, but they themselves concluded it was skill. Few of them would survive in her profession, which required tact and perspicacity.
She looked at the copy of the medical report. It was brief and said exactly what the attorney had paraphrased. The date was right; the headed note paper looked authentic; and there was the doctor's signature at the bottom. It was a name she knew.
Mma Ramotswe looked up from the papers to see Hector staring at her expectantly.
'It seems straightforward,' she said. 'He cut his finger and it became infected. What do your insurance people say?'
Hector sighed. 'They say I should pay up. They say that they'll cover me for it and it would be cheaper in the long run. Once one starts paying lawyers to defend it, then the costs can very quickly overtake the damages. Apparently they'll settle up to ten thousand pula without fighting, although they asked me not to tell anybody about that. They would not like people to think they're an easy touch.'
'Shouldn't you do what they say?' asked Mma Ramotswe. It seemed to her that there was no real point in denying that the accident had happened. Obviously this man had lost a finger and deserved some compensation; why should Hector make such a fuss about this when he did not even have to pay?
Hector guessed what she was thinking. 'I won't,' he said. 'I just refuse. Refuse. Why should I pay money to somebody who I think is trying to cheat me? If I pay him this time, then he'll go on to somebody else. I'd rather give that four thousand pula to somebody who deserved it.'
He pointed to the door that linked the office to the factory floor.
'I've got a woman in there,' he said, 'with ten children. Yes, ten. She's a good worker too. Think what she could do with four thousand pula.'
'But she hasn't lost a finger,' interrupted Mma Ramotswe. 'He might need that money if he can't work so well anymore.'
'Bah! Bah! He's a crook, that man. I couldn't sack him because I had nothing on him. But I knew he was no good. And some of the others didn't like him either. The boy who makes the tea, the one with a hole in his brain, he can always tell. He wouldn't take tea to him. He said that the man was a dog and couldn't drink tea. You see, he knew. These people sense these things.'
'But there's a big difference between entertaining suspicions and being able to prove something,' said Mma Ramotswe. 'You couldn't stand up in the High Court in Lobatse and say that there was something about this man which was not quite right. The judge would just laugh at you. That's what judges do when people say that sort of thing. They just laugh.'
Hector was silent.
'Just settle,' said Mma Ramotswe quietly. 'Do what the insurance people tell you to do. Otherwise you'll end up with a bill for far more than four thousand pula.'
Hector shook his head. 'I won't pay for something I didn't do,' he said through clenched teeth. 'I want you to find out what this man is up to. But if you come back to me in a week's time and say that I am wrong, then I will pay without a murmur. Will that do?'
Mma Ramotswe nodded. She could understand his reluctance to pay damages he thought he didn't owe, and her fee for a week's work would not be high. He was a wealthy man, and he was entitled to spend his own money in pursuit of a principle; and, if Moretsi was lying, then a fraudster would have been confounded in the process. So she agreed to act, and she drove away in her little white van wondering how she could prove that the missing finger had nothing to do with Hector's factory. As she parked the van outside her office and walked into the cool of her waiting room, she realised that she had absolutely no idea how to proceed. It had all the appearances of a hopeless case.
THAT NIGHT, as she lay in the bedroom of her house in Zebra Drive, Mma Ramotswe found that sleep eluded her. She got up, put on the pink slippers which she always wore since she had been stung by a scorpion while walking through the house at night, and went through to the kitchen to make a pot of bush tea.
The house seemed so different at night. Everything was in its correct place, of course, but somehow the furniture seemed more angular and the pictures on the wall more one-dimensional. She remembered somebody saying that at night we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and this struck her as being true. All the familiar objects of her daily life looked as if they belonged to somebody else, somebody called Mma Ramotswe, who was not quite the person walking about in pink slippers.
Even the photograph of her Daddy in his shiny blue suit seemed different. This was a person called Daddy Ramotswe, of course, but not the Daddy she had known, the Daddy who had sacrificed everything for her, and whose last wish had been to see her happily settled in a business. How proud he would have been to have seen her now, the owner of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, known to everybody of note in town, even to permanent secretaries and Government ministers. And how important he would have felt had he seen her that very morning almost bumping into the Malawian High Commissioner as she left the President Hotel and the High Commissioner saying: 'Good morning, Mma Ramotswe, you almost knocked me down there, but there's nobody I would rather be knocked down by than you, my goodness!' To be known to a High Commissioner! To be greeted by name by people like that! Not that she was impressed by them, of course, even high commissioners; but her Daddy would have been, and she regretted that he had not lived to see his plans for her come to fruition.
She made her tea and settled down to drink it on her most comfortable chair. It was a hot night and the dogs were howling throughout the town, egging one another on in the darkness. It was not a sound you really noticed anymore, she thought. They were always there, these howling dogs, defending their yards against all sorts of shadows and winds. Stupid creatures!
She thought of Hector. He was a stubborn man – famously so – but she rather respected him for it. Why should he pay? What was it he had said: If I pay him this time then he'll go on to somebody else. She thought for a moment, and then put the mug of bush tea down on the table. The idea had come to her suddenly, as all her good ideas seemed to come. Perhaps Hector was the somebody else. Perhaps he had already made claims elsewhere. Perhaps Hector was not the first!
Sleep proved easier after that, and she awoke the next morning confident that a few enquiries, and perhaps a trip up to Mahalapye, would be all that was required to dispose of Moretsi's spurious claim. She breakfasted quickly and then drove directly to the office. It was getting towards the end of winter, which meant that the temperature of the air was just right, and the sky was bright, pale blue, and cloudless. There was a slight smell of wood-smoke in the air, a smell that tugged at her heart because it reminded her of mornings around the fire in Mochudi. She would go back there, she thought, when she had worked long enough to retire. She would buy a house, or build one perhaps, and ask some of her cousins to live with her. They would grow melons on the lands and might even buy a small shop in the village; and every morning she could sit in front of her house and sniff at the wood-smoke and look forward to spending the day talking with her friends. How sorry she felt for white people, who couldn't do any of this, and who were always dashing around and worrying themselves over things that were going to happen anyway. What use was it having all that money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle eating grass? None, in her view; none at all, and yet they did not know it. Every so often you met a white person who understood, who realised how things really were; but these people were few and far between and the other white people often treated them with suspicion.
The woman who swept her office was already there when she arrived. She asked after her family, and the
