MMA RAMOTSWE KNEW that she should not have left the office that afternoon. She now had rather more to do than she wanted, and none of the problems which had landed on her desk appeared to have any answer. There was a series of issues, each of them demanding to be resolved but each curiously resistant to solution. There was Mokolodi, which she should do something about sooner or later; there was Mma Tsau and the blackmailing letter; and then there was the question of Mr Polopetsi’s mean uncle and his favouritism towards Mr Polopetsi’s brother, for whom he had bought a car. She thought about that. No, there was nothing that she could do—just now—about that. The world was imperfect, and there were just too many claims. One day, perhaps, but not now. So that came off the list, which left one remaining item, the most difficult of course: the doctor. She admired Boitelo for coming to see her; many people would just have given up in the face of a wrong which they could not right, but she had brought the issue to her. And Boitelo had been correct, Mma Ramotswe thought, about civic duty. It was her duty not to stand by in the face of evidence of medical wrongdoing; and it was Mma Ramotswe’s civic duty to do something now that the issue had been brought to her attention. But it was difficult to think what to do, and, as she often did in such circumstances, Mma Ramotswe decided that the best thing to do would be to go shopping. She often found that ideas came to her when shopping, halfway down the vegetable aisle in the supermarket, or when trying on a skirt—which would inevitably be just a little bit too tight—she would have an idea and what had previously been a log-jam would gradually begin to shift.

“We shall go shopping, Mma Makutsi,” she announced after Boitelo had taken her leave. “We shall go downtown.”

Mma Makutsi looked up from her desk. She was working on a rather complex matter at the moment, the pursuit of a debtor on behalf of a firm of lawyers. The debtor, a Mr Cedric Disani, had established a hotel which had gone spectacularly bankrupt. It was thought that he had extensive holdings in land, and they now had a list of properties from the land register and were trying to work out which were owned by companies in which he had an interest. It was one of the most testing cases Mma Makutsi had ever been allocated, but at least it had a fee attached to it—a generous one—and this would make up for all the public-spirited work which Mma Ramotswe seemed to be taking on.