The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection: No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (13) by Alexander McCall Smith

bathroom to wash his hands, but they continued their conversation down the corridor. The children were never disturbed by the sound of voices and would sleep through even the most animated conversation elsewhere in the house.
    “So something happened,” he called out. “You found out some big important bit of information? You won a big prize—ten thousand pula? You saw a lion under your desk?”
    She laughed. “These are all quite possible developments, Rra.” For a moment she imagined Mma Makutsi suddenly whispering across the office, “Don’t make any sudden movements, Mma, but I think there is a lion under your desk. I think I can see its tail.” And she would reply, “I shall take what action is necessary, Mma Makutsi, but we really should finish dictation first …”
    There came the sound of splashing water, and then the gurgle of the basin draining. “So what was it?” Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni asked. “You had a visitor?”
    “Yes,” she replied.
    “What did you say, Mma?”
    She raised her voice. “I said yes, Rra. We had a visitor, but you will never, never guess who it was. Not in a year of guessing. Not even then, with twenty, fifty guesses a day; even then you would never get it.”
    There was a momentary silence at the other end of the corridor. A tap was run again, and then there came the sound of the towel roller turning. “Well, Rra,” Mma Ramotswe went on. “Try to guess. I’ll give you one clue: he is very important.”
    “That man who wrote that book of yours. What is his name? That Chlorine Andersen, or whatever he’s called.”
    “Clovis, not Chlorine.”
    “Him?”
    She sounded crestfallen. “Yes, Rra. How did you know?”
    He came back into the room, wiping his hands on the sides of his khaki trousers. “I guessed. You said that I would never guess, and so I chose the most unlikely name I could think of. And that was that man, Clovis Andersen. That’s how I did it, Mma. Simple.”
    OVER A LARGE HELPING of mutton stew, Mma Ramotswe narrated the story of her extraordinary meeting with Clovis Andersen. It was the same story that Mma Makutsi had, just an hour or so earlier, told Phuti Radiphuti; but more accurate, perhaps, in Mma Ramotswe’s telling of it than in that of her assistant. Mma Makutsi had a tendency to embellish stories for dramatic effect, or at least to tell the tale from her own perspective. In her version, then, Clovis Andersen had introduced himself first to her, rather than to Mma Ramotswe, had been facing her desk when he sat down, and had addressed almost all of his remarks to her. But in this, surely, she could be forgiven; for who among us does not see the world as turning towards him or her rather than towards others? The weather is weather in so far as it affects
us;
great events are great events in that they have an impact on
our
lives; life, in short, was to be judged by what it had in store for Mma Makutsi, or for those within her immediate circle. This was neither solipsism nor selfishness—Mma Makutsi was actually quite generous; rather, it was a matter of
perspective
. It was a universe made up of several key institutions, principal among which was the Botswana Secretarial College and all that it represented (the motto of the college being
Be Accurate
). Then there was the Double Comfort Furniture Store, to which she was now firmly attached as the wife of its managing director (and the motto of that concern was
Be Comfortable
); the Government of Botswana, its ministers and permanent secretaries;and finally the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and its owner and founder, Mma Ramotswe. This was her world, and these were the bodies to which she was unswervingly loyal.
    Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni listened with interest to the story that Mma Ramotswe told, only interrupting her occasionally for clarification of some salient point.
    “Out of the blue?” he asked. “He came out of the blue? Just like that?”
    “Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. She had not told him