Precious and Grace by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

she said.
    “Word gets out,” mused Mma Makutsi. “Have a good idea, and word gets out. It always does.”

CHAPTER SIX

MR. TWENTY-FIVE PER CENT
    M MA RAMOTSWE had been confronted with cases like this before, where the client wanted to find out something but could provide very little information. The fallibility of human memory, its vague and impressionistic nature, meant that the details that would enable a reconstruction of the past were simply not there. Sometimes the vagueness was extreme, as where a woman searching for the father of her child, conceived twenty-five years previously, remembered only the nickname by which she and his friends knew him. As if this were not difficult enough, she had then produced a photograph of him in which his face had been cut out, leaving only torso and limbs for identification.
    “I was cross with him,” she said, “and so I cut out his face and threw it down the toilet.”
    Mma Ramotswe had been understanding. Men who sired children and then failed to accept responsibility for them were anathema to her, and she reserved particular disapproval for those who then completely disappeared. She wondered how they managed it; was there some sort of secret organisation, known only to men, that spirited them away, perhaps giving them a new identity under which they could continue their irresponsible ways? In that case she had eventually managed to find him through a trick, mentioned by Clovis Andersen in
The Principles of Private Detection,
that she had thought would never work, but did.
If all else fails,
wrote Mr. Andersen,
you can try to trace people by asking them to step forward! Yes, believe it or not, that works. Place an ad in the press asking for—and here insert the name of the person (you have, at least, to know that)—to reply to a box number about a possible legacy. That may work. Of course there is the familiar ethical issue, but remember you are only talking about a possible legacy and it’s always possible that anybody will get a legacy one of these days.
    Mma Ramotswe had been very doubtful but had eventually put in a small advertisement saying,
“If the person known as Fancy Harry, resident in Gaborone twenty-five years ago, contacts the undermentioned, he will learn something of great interest to himself.”
That wording, she decided, was completely honest. Fancy Harry, if he responded, would imagine that it was financial interest to which the advertisement was referring, but learning that your child and her mother were keen to contact you was undoubtedly of interest too, even if it was not exactly welcome information.
    To her astonishment it worked. Fancy Harry responded, giving his current address and his real name, and adding that he could provide details of his bank account if required. She did not know what happened after she had provided this information to her client, but if Fancy Harry had an unwelcome shock, it was thoroughly deserved, as far as Mma Ramotswe was concerned; not that she expressed the same delight in this outcome as did Mma Makutsi. She had danced a small jig round the office when the reply was received, chanting, “That will teach men to have their fun and then disappear.”
    Mma Ramotswe wondered whether a similar approach might bear fruit in Susan’s case. She asked Mma Makutsi for her views, and was told that there would be no harm in trying. “People read the small ads in the
Botswana Daily News,
” she said. “There are many people who find them more interesting than the main news. If you put in something like
‘Are you called Rosie and did you work a long time ago for a Canadian family?’
then there may be people who knew her even if she herself does not read it.”
    “But what about impostors?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “There will be many people who will sniff out some financial gain and will claim to be that Rosie. What will we do about them?”
    Mma Makutsi clearly had not thought about that, and looked disappointed. But then