dangle by his collar, awaiting instructions from his wife.
Unware of this vision, of course, Mma Makutsi continued to expound on the merits of hooks. “It’s a good idea to have hooks for men’s clothes, in my view. You know how untidy they are, Mma. You know how they leave their things lying around on the floor.”
Mma Ramotswe, in spite of her commitment to fairness, had to agree. Men were very untidy, for the most part. They could not help it, she knew, and one could not blame them for it, as neither could they help being men. It was just the way things were.
“You’re right about clothes on the floor, Mma Makutsi,” she said, a tinge of resignation in her voice. “I’m always picking up clothes. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni does it, and so does Puso. They just leave them on the floor. And then…” She remembered something with a shudder. “It can be dangerous too. Puso left his trousers on the floor one night and the next morning, when he put them on, a scorpion was hiding in one of the legs.”
Mma Makutsi winced. “That would have been very sore, Mma.”
“It was,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Those creatures give a very bad sting. Very bad.”
Mma Makutsi winced again. “Ow!”
“He yelled and yelled,” Mma Ramotswe continued. “Poor little boy.”
“If he had put the trousers up on a hook, then it would not have happened.”
Mma Ramotswe nodded. “No, it would not.” She decided to change the subject. Hooks were useful, but there was a limit to what one could say about them. “That was a good wedding, I think, Mma. We enjoyed it.”
“A very good wedding,” Mma Makutsi agreed. “Unfortunately, Phuti developed a headache and we didn’t stay all that long. It was being out in the sun, you see. He doesn’t like that very much and it gives him a headache sometimes. The sun makes the brain swell and then it presses on the skull, which cannot expand very much, if at all.”
She looked at Mma Ramotswe while she continued to polish the lenses of her spectacles. “The skull is the same size all the time,” she said. “Once you’re fully grown, your head doesn’t get any bigger. Even if you become quite fat, Mma—even then. Your body gets bigger, but your head stays the same size.”
“I think I know that, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You don’t hear many people say, ‘Oh, my head is getting so big, I must go on a diet.’ ”
Mma Makutsi put on her spectacles. “That’s true. And there’s another thing I’ve thought about, Mma, and that is the relationship between the size of the head and intelligence. You’d think there’d be a connection, wouldn’t you?”
Mma Ramotswe was doubtful. Any such connection would be far too obvious, she thought, and one thing she had learned in her profession was that that which is obvious frequently turns out to be false. Except sometimes, of course, as Clovis Andersen himself pointed out in The Principles of Private Detection. He advised his readers to look at the most likely possibilities first because a cunning malefactor might assume—incorrectly, it was to be hoped—that the obvious solution would be discounted in any search or enquiry. If I were a thief trying to conceal the things I had stolen, he wrote, I would put them behind a door marked “Storeroom for Stolen Items.” That would be the safest place, as everybody would think that was far too obvious. People would look everywhere but behind that door. It is all a question of psychology.
Mma Makutsi recalled one of the instructors at the Botswana Secretarial College. “I remember one of my professors…,” she began.
Mma Ramotswe raised an eyebrow. She had heard Mma Makutsi refer to her teachers as professors, but it was completely unjustified. Whatever the merits of the Botswana Secretarial College might be, it was still just that—a secretarial college. It was not a branch of the University of Botswana, as were places like the Botswana College of Agriculture. It did not award degrees, and its staff were definitely not professors.
When she first heard mention of these so-called professors, she had felt inclined to stop Mma Makutsi and say, “But who are these professors, Mma? I didn’t know that the Botswana Secretarial College was part of the University of Botswana, where all the professors work. This is very interesting news, Mma.” She had not said this, though; kindness prevented her, as it always did. If Mma Makutsi wanted to promote her teachers