The Double Comfort Safari Club - By Alexander McCall Smith Page 0,42

that “no” was not one of the words that her heart understood. She had laughed at the appraisal; in her view, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was every bit as soft-hearted as she was—he would never turn anybody away, and would fix even the most mechanically hopeless cars—and as for Mma Potokwane, well, everybody knew that she would do anything for those orphans she looked after, and if that was not a sign of a soft heart, then what was? So although she knew that she should have declined to help Mma Mateleke, she also knew that she could not refuse her friend. But she did not relish the task that lay ahead of her, as it would involve watching somebody she knew, and that was not a good idea.

It was easy enough watching a stranger. One could sit in one’s van and pretend to be reading, or even sleeping. Plenty of people did that: they sat in their cars, talking to friends or listening to the car radio, or even just sitting. Nobody would have reason to be suspicious of that. But if one sat in one’s van outside the house of somebody one knew, and then followed him as he turned out of the drive, one would obviously be noticed. She imagined the scene, as Herbert Mateleke asked her, “Mma Ramotswe, I saw you sitting outside my house yesterday afternoon. It was you, wasn’t it? I’m sure it was. And then when I drove off down the road, you followed me. Perhaps you wanted me to show you the way, Mma …” And she would not know what to say, but would mumble something about how small the town was, in spite of being so big, and how easy it was to bump into people one knew along the road, just as easy, in fact, as in one of those tiny villages …

By the time she had reached the shared premises of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, she had decided that she could not possibly follow Herbert Mateleke, and that the only thing to do was to stick to the procedure that she used in so many of her cases. If she wanted to find out the answer to anything, then she simply had to ask somebody. It was that simple, it really was, and she had done this on numerous occasions, with conspicuously successful results. Sometimes the answer she received was direct; on other occasions it was not so direct, but was nonetheless unambiguous. She remembered how, in one investigation into pilfering in an office—disappearing petty cash and so on—she had simply called the staff to attend a meeting. Then, as they all stood before her, some twelve people, she had said, “Now then, everybody, the manager says that money has been stolen, and I wonder who’s doing it?” And immediately all pairs of eyes had turned and looked at one member of staff, who had stared steadfastly at the ground. People know, she thought; they know things that they might be unwilling to say. Nobody in that office would have been willing to denounce the offender openly, but we reveal so much through our eyes. Our eyes, she thought, show what is in the heart.

That experience, called to mind as she made her way into the office, pointed the way. Yes, she would go and speak to Herbert Mateleke and talk to him about somebody else having an affair, and his eyes would give her all the information she needed. After that, she might be in a position to ask him, rather more directly, whether she could help him in any way with any difficulties he was experiencing. But then there would be an additional problem: he might speak to her in confidence, and that would mean that she could not reveal what he said to Mma Mateleke, and she was now, in a way, her client, and … and all that underlined the fact that she should not have said yes in the first place. She sighed; Clovis Andersen was useful, but he usually only came up with general propositions. There was nowhere in the book where you could go and get concrete advice about a situation such as this. Oh, to be able to speak to somebody like Clovis Andersen in person—but he was somewhere far away, and he would never have heard of Mma Ramotswe and the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, nor of Botswana, perhaps, and he might