The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (17 page)

Mma Ramotswe thought it was obvious. ‘The aunt. The nephew.’ She paused as she tried to imagine who else had an interest in the outcome of the Molapo succession. Eventually she said, ‘And the lawyer too, I suppose.’ She had her suspicions about Mma Sheba, and perhaps it was now time to spell them out.

Mma Makutsi looked thoughtful. ‘Her? Why would a lawyer be interested?’

‘She is a lawyer who is giving us opinions. And if anybody gives you an opinion, then you have to ask what they want to achieve by that opinion.’

Mma Ramotswe reached out to touch the tablecloth on the table at which they were sitting. It had been embroidered round the edges with brightly coloured images of Botswana flowers. She touched a motif of a jacaranda blossom – more purple.

‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that lawyers may want a case to work out in a particular way. If you are defending somebody and you think he is innocent, then…’

Mma Makutsi became animated. ‘Exactly. Or if you are looking after an inheritance and you think that the person who stands to get it is not a good person, then you might want to do all you can —’

‘To prevent that happening,’ supplied Mma Ramotswe.

They stared at one another.

‘So you need to look at the will, Mma,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘Anybody can do that, you know.’

It was Mma Ramotswe who had first told Mma Makutsi about the government registry where wills, and all sorts of other documents, could be seen – for a fee.

‘I do know that, Mma,’ she said. ‘In fact, I think I may have told you about it a few years ago.’

Mma Makutsi shrugged. ‘Maybe. But have you looked at the will, Mma?’

‘No, I haven’t. Not yet.’

‘Because it will show who stands to gain if Liso is not Liso,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘And that is what we really need to know.’

Mma Ramotswe was thoughtful. ‘I shall do this,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘There is a man. Phuti told me about him. He bought a sofa.’

Mma Ramotswe waited for her to continue. Since she had married Phuti Radiphuti, sofas and chairs and all sorts of furniture regularly entered Mma Makutsi’s conversation, and people were described in terms of the furniture they had bought. Thus a prominent politician had been identified as a man who had a large dining room table made of Zambian
mukwa
wood; or a rising businesswomen had been referred to as having recently acquired a set of expensive office chairs.

‘This man with the sofa,’ Mma Makutsi went on, ‘ is called the Master of the High Court. He keeps all the wills.’

‘A big filing task,’ said Mma Ramotswe.

Mma Makutsi rolled her eyes heavenward as she contemplated the immensity of filing all the wills made in Botswana. She would have no trouble in coping with it herself, of course, but the Master of the High Court, whatever else his training, would not have had the benefit of studying at the Botswana Secretarial College. Had he done that, then he would have studied filing under the tutorship of the legendary teacher who had taught Mma Makutsi, a woman who was now living in retirement in one of the western suburbs but whom she saw occasionally doing her grocery shopping. It pleased Mma Makutsi that her tutor remembered her name. It can be difficult for teachers, through whose hands pass so many students every year, but she had remembered, saying, ‘My goodness, Grace Makutsi, you are the one who did so well. And now I hear that you are a very senior investigator. We are proud of you, you know.’

Mma Makutsi agreed with Mma Ramotswe. ‘I am sure, though, that they have it under control, Mma. It may take them some time to find it, but they will have it.’

They moved on to discuss Mma Soleti. Mma Ramotswe told Mma Makutsi about the whispering campaign and the identification of the potential enemy. Her assistant listened with interest.

‘It may be that woman,’ she said once Mma Ramotswe had finished. ‘It may be that she is angry because Mma Soleti has stolen her husband. You should go and see her.’

‘I am intending to do that,’ said Mma Ramotswe.

Mma Makutsi bit her lip. ‘May I ask you something, Mma?’

‘Of course.’

‘May I come with you? You see, I want to get back to work as soon as possible, and if I can do the occasional small thing then that will help me so much. It is not that I do not like being here with my baby – with Itumelang – but it’s just that… well, Mma Ramotswe, I know I’ve only been away for a few days, but I’m missing our office, I’m missing the conversations we have, the discussions. I miss making tea for you. I even miss filing.’

Mma Ramotswe was taken aback to learn that, even with a new baby to care for, her assistant shared the same feelings she had experienced, but then she knew that, were we suddenly separated from them, we all would miss the things that made up our daily lives – even if these things were mundane and inconsequential.

‘Your filing is exceptional,’ said Mma Ramotswe. And the compliment was received with all the gravity accorded to those compliments that are fully intended – and fully justified.

‘I think I’ll come back very soon,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘The baby is small, but —’

Mma Ramotswe interrupted her. ‘The baby is very, very small, Mma.’

‘Yes, but that makes him easier to carry. And I think it’s good for babies to get out and about; I am a modern person in that respect, Mma Ramotswe.’ She paused. ‘So, if you have no objection, Mma…’

Mma Ramotswe smiled. ‘I have no objection, Mma.’

‘I’ll come in for a few hours at a time.’

‘As you wish, Mma Makutsi.’

They remained silent after that, sitting in the silence of a friendship that was the greatest and deepest and most valuable friendship that either of them had ever had, or ever would have. Then it was time for a further cup of tea and the conversation shifted to the subject of husbands, on which they both declared themselves to be most fortunate.

‘I would not want Phuti to change,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘He is perfect just as he is.’

‘And I would not like Mr J. L. B. Matekoni to change either,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘For the same reason.’

This was not strictly speaking true. Neither husband was perfect – as both wives knew – but then who among us is perfect? Nobody, thought Mma Ramotswe. And Mma Makutsi thought much the same thing, but perhaps slightly more forcefully.

M
ma Soleti had given Mma Ramotswe the name of her enemy and Mma Ramotswe had written it down on a scrap of paper. The following day, sitting in the office of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, she examined what she had written.
Daisy Manchwe, runs a photocopy shop in town
. That was all that Mma Soleti had said about her; she clearly found the subject distasteful. That did not surprise Mma Ramotswe a great deal: we do not, in general, like to discuss those we have wronged, and it seemed to her that whatever Mma Soleti said about Daisy Manchwe’s husband being ready to leave, it was likely that this was a simple case of husband-grabbing. In her experience, those who took the husbands or wives of others could rewrite history – not always, but often – and the marriage they had broken up would be portrayed as being in much worse condition than it really was.

She had no real idea what she would find when she went to see Daisy Manchwe, but she felt the likelihood was she would find that Daisy had done nothing to justify her husband’s departure and would, indeed, be nurturing antagonism towards Mma Soleti. One could never really understand other people’s marriages. Mma Ramotswe was as well aware of that as anybody – perhaps even more so, given that her work often required her to investigate the conjugal arrangements of others. A marriage, she had learned, is seldom what it seems to be on the surface; what appears to be the most equable, well settled of arrangements might be a seething mass of discontent and resentment underneath. And conversely, chaotic and noisy relationships, littered with conflict and infidelity, might prove to be the most durable of unions. There was simply no telling, she felt, and you had to be prepared to find anything.

This did not mean, though, that she thought Mma Soleti was wrong about the enmity of Mma Manchwe. You could be mistaken about many things in this life, thought Mma Ramotswe, but one thing that you were very rarely wrong about was whether somebody disliked you – that you could always tell. If Mma Soleti thought that Daisy Manchwe nursed an undying hatred towards her for stealing her husband, then she was probably right. She would have seen the daggers in the other woman’s eyes; daggers in the eyes were always visible, sometimes even through sunglasses.

It was not difficult to locate Daisy Manchwe’s details in the Gaborone Trade Directory. This was a publication heavily relied upon by Mma Makutsi, who believed that most tasks of identification could be completed by the simple expedient of looking through the telephone book or any of the other public directories she kept in the top drawer of her desk.

‘It’s all there,’ she said to Mma Ramotswe. ‘You just have to know where to look – which I do, Mma. I know my way around these things.’

The trade directory revealed that there were three photocopying businesses in the town. Daisy Manchwe’s, known as Clear Image Copies, was located in the new cluster of shops that had been set up near Kgale Hill. It was not a place that Mma Ramotswe liked to go, as she was loyal to the older and more sedate Riverwalk shopping centre. She also liked small, local shops; places where you were able to buy pins and candles and tins of syrup – the sort of
real
things that you needed, rather than the insubstantial clothes and flashy electrical goods that newer, louder shops sold.

The directory entry for Clear Image Copies
put the matter of ownership beyond doubt.
Founded and under the management of Daisy Manchwe
, it read, before going on to reveal that the prices at which copies could be made could not be bettered elsewhere in Gaborone.
From one to one thousand copies
, came the claim,
we are the cheapest and the clearest in town.

The directory entry provided even more interesting information than these advertising puffs. At the bottom of the entry was a picture of Daisy Manchwe herself, standing proudly in front of a large photocopying machine. Mma Ramotswe studied the picture with interest. It was not very clearly printed – a sorry thing for a company that boasted of clear images – but then they had not printed the directory and would presumably have done a much better job themselves. What struck Mma Ramotswe about the picture was the cheerful look of Daisy Manchwe. People smiled when having their photographs taken, of course, but if you were heartbroken inside, your camera smile would always be unconvincing. Daisy Manchwe did not look like the abandoned spouse; far from it – she appeared happy with the world.

It was a passing reflection and did not amount to much, but it was something that she mentioned to Mma Makutsi when she picked her up from her house. She felt extremely cheerful herself when they set off in the van together. This was just like it used to be – the two of them heading off on some investigation, going over the details of the case together in the cab of the tiny white van as they watched Botswana pass by.

‘There was no trouble leaving Itumelang?’ she asked, as Mma Makutsi settled herself in the van on their departure.

Mma Makutsi shook her head. ‘He is sleeping, and the girl I have helping me is very good. There is his bottle in the fridge and he will be given that. It is personal milk.’

Mma Ramotswe had not heard the expression
personal milk
before, but she rather liked it. ‘Personal milk is very good,’ she said.

‘Yes, it is. And I am having no trouble with that side of things, Mma, so I will soon be able to come back to work more or less full-time.’

‘I will be very happy when that happens,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Of course, you have Phuti’s aunt to help with running the house. I suppose that will make it easier.’

Mma Makutsi shook her head. ‘I do not, Mma. The aunt has gone.’

Mma Ramotswe looked at her companion, a lapse in attention that caused the van to swerve towards the side of the road. She corrected quickly.

‘Well, Mma, that’s an interesting piece of news. Was there a…’ There must have been a fight, she thought, and for a moment she imagined Mma Makutsi and the aunt locked in battle, the aunt perhaps clutching at Mma Makutsi’s large glasses and Mma Makutsi struggling to hold on to them.

‘An argument?’ supplied Mma Makutsi. ‘Yes, there were arguments, but I did not antagonise her. I felt too weak and tired to do that. I thought that I would have it out with her later on, once I was stronger.’

‘That is wise,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘They say that it is very important to choose your moment.’ She paused. ‘Some people never find their moment. You see them waiting and waiting, but never finding it.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘What happened, though, had nothing to do with me. It was a snake.’

Mma Ramotswe recalled that Mma Makutsi had said something about Phuti having killed a cobra in the house. Had that upset the aunt?

Mma Makutsi grinned. Victory over the aunt had clearly been sweet. ‘It was not that, Mma,’ she said. ‘What happened was that Phuti had only dealt with one of the snakes. Then I went into labour and we forgot all about the fact that there was another one around somewhere. While I was in hospital, he searched the house from top to bottom but did not find it, and so he concluded that it had gone away. But it had not.’

Mma Ramotswe gave an involuntary shiver. Like most of her fellow Batswana, she did not like snakes, although she had come round to the more tolerant view that they should be left alone as much as possible. In that, she was a minority; people still killed them on sight, not bothering to distinguish between the non-venomous and the venomous ones – the cobras, the mambas, the puff adders – that one could not allow to be around the house. The puff adders were the most dangerous, even if their venom was not as powerful as that of the black mambas. The
lebolobolo
, as the puff adder was known in Setswana, was a lazy snake, not given to moving very fast – except when striking – and the danger was that it would not get out of your way. Cobras and mambas generally avoided contact with people, although the mamba could be aggressive and might pursue an intruder on its territory. Puff adders did not stir themselves; they could lie in sluggish inactivity halfway across a path and then respond with furious and fatal indignation if trodden upon.

The thought occurred to her that the aunt had been bitten. Mma Makutsi had said that the aunt had ‘gone’; surely that could not mean that the aunt was late? Surely she would not have dropped this fact into the conversation so casually. Mma Makutsi might be prickly from time to time, but she was not as cold-hearted as that.

Mma Makutsi explained what had happened. ‘The aunt complained about noises in the ceiling above her bed,’ she said. ‘Phuti said that he thought she was imagining things, which made her very angry. So he eventually got a ladder and went up into the roof. That is where he found the snake’s skin. But he also found something else, which he didn’t tell us about when he came down.

‘The aunt was very frightened. She started to shout and weep and say that now that the snake had shed its skin it would be very hungry and would be looking for something to bite. Phuti tried to calm her down. He said, “Oh no, Auntie, there is no danger. I promise you there is no danger.”

‘The aunt did not like this,’ Mma Makutsi continued. ‘She carried on shouting and pointing at the empty snakeskin. Phuti kept telling her that he was sure that there was no danger. Nobody was going to be bitten by a snake, he said.’

Mma Ramotswe smiled at the thought of the two Radiphutis – nephew and aunt – at odds with one another, with the snakeskin, the vital evidence, in front of them.

‘Eventually,’ said Mma Makutsi, ‘the aunt said that she could not stay in a house that was crawling with snakes and she was better off in her own place.’

‘She left?’

‘She left, Mma. And then, after she had gone, Phuti did not say anything, but he climbed back up into the roof. I heard him moving about up there and I was worried that he would fall through the ceiling – he did not. Then he came down, Mma Ramotswe, and he was carrying a dead cobra. He had not killed this snake – it had died because it had choked on a rat that was too big for it. You could see the shape of the rat in its throat.’

Mma Ramotswe chuckled. ‘Phuti did not lie to his aunt. He told her that there was no danger, and there was not. There was no longer any snake.’

‘That is right,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘Sometimes saying what is true may not be altogether true but is still not a lie.’

‘That is so, Mma,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘That is entirely true, I think.’

Mma Makutsi now changed the subject. ‘This woman we are going to see,’ she said. ‘This Daisy Manchwe.’

‘Yes?’

‘What are you going to say to her?’

Mma Ramotswe hesitated for a few moments before replying. ‘We shall need to be careful.’

‘Of course.’

‘We will tell her that we have been looking into threats against Mma Soleti. Then we watch her reaction. Guilty people give themselves away, Mma.’

Mma Makutsi agreed. ‘And then? What if she gives herself away – what then?’

‘Then we… Then we…’ Mma Ramotswe faltered.

‘Yes, Mma?’

‘We remind her that this is a country in which the law says that you cannot intimidate people. We mention a lawyer.’

‘Which lawyer, Mma?’

Mma Ramotswe shrugged. ‘Any lawyer, Mma. There are plenty of them. And anyway, people who tell other people about their lawyers rarely have a lawyer. Just mentioning a lawyer is usually enough, even if you don’t have one, which we don’t.’

‘Mma Sheba?’

Mma Ramotswe had not thought of her. It was useful to have a name of a lawyer, even if the lawyer had not agreed to act for you. ‘A very good idea, Mma,’ she said. ‘Now we have a lawyer.’

The premises of Clear Image Copies were sandwiched between a takeaway food place and a shop selling fashionable men’s shoes. Mma Makutsi stopped outside the men’s shoe shop; she had never been able to walk past a shoe shop without pausing to admire the display, and Mma Ramotswe waited patiently as her assistant examined the offerings in the window.

‘Shoes are wasted on men,’ said Mma Makutsi. ‘They don’t appreciate them, Mma.’

Mma Ramotswe made a non-committal sound. Mr J. L. B. Matekoni possessed two pairs of shoes: one was his working pair, made of ancient suede and covered in grease to the extent that their original colour could not be discerned, and the other was a black leather pair that he donned on those occasions when he wore his one and only suit. ‘I do not need more shoes than that,’ he said to Mma Ramotswe. ‘I have only got one pair of feet.’

‘Those shoes over there,’ said Mma Makutsi, pointing to a pair of white shoes with narrow, pointed toes. ‘Those are very good shoes, Mma – very fashionable, I think – but there would be no point my buying those for Phuti. No point at all. He would not appreciate them. Men never do.’ She paused. ‘And he has that problem with his foot after that accident. He can’t use any old shoes.’

She reluctantly tore herself away from the shoe shop window and joined Mma Ramotswe, who was now standing outside the door of Clear Image Copies. It was not a large store, and much of the space within was occupied by a photocopying machine that was in action when they arrived, spitting out paper into a receiving tray at the side. Operating this machine was a woman in a red dress, who looked out through the shop window when Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi appeared. She nodded to the two women, and then continued with her task of duplication.

Mma Ramotswe entered first.

‘One moment, Mma,’ the woman said. ‘One moment and I will be finished.’

The machine cast a leaked band of light across the wall with each pass. Mma Ramotswe noticed how the light caught Mma Makutsi’s glasses and was reflected for a second time. Their eyes met briefly and she thought: she has decided; her mind is made up.

The machine gave a final whirr and then settled into silence. ‘There you are,’ said the woman. ‘Another job done.’ She flicked a switch. ‘Now then, ladies, what can I do for you?’

Mma Ramotswe did not approve of the sudden launch into business. She felt that even if you had things to do, there was no reason not to introduce yourself and enquire after the other person. That was the way it had always been done in Botswana, and she saw no reason to change. So she greeted the woman in the traditional way and introduced herself.