The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party by Alexander McCall Smith

collapsed.”
    Mma Ramotswe did not stir. The chair beneath her felt solid enough, but it certainly had creaked and even yielded a bit when she had put her weight on it. A chair should be able to support a traditionally built person, and that should apply in particular, she felt, to a traditional chair.
    “But you haven’t come to see me about chairs, Mma Ramotswe,” Mr. Moeti continued, seating himself casually on the low parapet of the verandah.
    “I came because of your problem,” said Mma Ramotswe. She noticed in the corner of her eye that the woman in the apron was hovering in the doorway. “That private problem you told me about.”
    Noticing the look, Mr. Moeti flashed a quick dismissive glance in the woman’s direction.
    “That is the woman who looks after the kitchen,” he said. “She has been here forever. Most of these people”—he gestured towards the surrounding bush—“were born on this land. I suppose it’s as much theirs as it is mine, except … except that it isn’t.”
    She looked at him quizzically. “I’m not sure if I follow you, Rra.”
    He laughed. “I’m not surprised. I didn’t put that very well. What I meant to say is that these people—the people who work for me on the farm—were born here. Their fathers worked for the farmer who owned this place before me. Now they work for me. They’re fixtures, really.”
    Mma Ramotswe nodded. She understood perfectly well; the land came with people, and with the stories of those people. And so when somebody bought the land—as people could do, if they had the money—then they bought not only the land but its people too. For the most part, the new owners would understand that, unless they were foreigners who had no idea of the meaning of land in Africa. But Mr. Moeti, a Motswana, would know exactly what obligations land ownership brought; or she hoped he would. If he did not, then he would soon make enemies, and could easily find that his property came under attack. It was only too easy to start a bush fire, to turn a swathe of golden-grassed cattle range into charred stubble; it was only too easy to take a knife to the Achilles tendon of a cow.
    “Are there many such people, Rra? Many here, I mean.”
    He replied that there were. It was difficult to tell exactly how many people lived on the farm, as not only were babies always being born, but there was also movement away to the towns, or deaths. But if pressed, he would say forty people altogether, in three families. These were all related to one another through complex and convoluted genealogies that only the old people remembered, and even they were now forgetting.
    “Do you get on well with them?” asked Mma Ramotswe.
    His answer came quickly, and unambiguously. “If you think it’s one of them, Mma,” he said, “then you couldn’t be more wrong. I am their friend, and always have been. There are many children named after me. Go to that place where they live, over there by thedam, and call out ‘Botsalo,’ and then see how many children come running over. No, it cannot be one of them, Mma Ramotswe.”
    “I did not say it was, Rra,” she said mildly.
    “You implied it.”
    She shrugged. “I have to ask questions. I have to pry—otherwise, how would we find out who has done this terrible thing?”
    He said that he understood this.
    “And that lady in the kitchen?” Mma Ramotswe went on to ask, looking into the house, her voice lowered. “What about her?”
    Mr. Moeti hesitated. “That lady is a very close friend, Mma. She is my wife, but isn’t my wife, if you understand me.”
    She understood, but reflected for a moment on his curious way of throwing opposites together—this was the second time he had done it. “You have a wife, Rra? A legal one?”
    He pointed. “She is down in Lobatse. She prefers to be in town. She lives here but she doesn’t live here, if you see what I mean.”
    Now it occurred to Mma Ramotswe that there was another suspect: the wife