They walked together in the direction of another shop that Mma Ramotswe had identified as a possible stockist of pressure cookers. All about them there were well-dressed crowds, people with money in their pockets, people buying for homes that were slowly beginning to reflect Botswana’s prosperity. It had all been earned, every single pula of it, in a world in which it is hard enough to make something of one’s country, in a world of selfish and distant people who took one’s crops at rock-bottom prices and wrote the rules to suit themselves. There were plenty of fine words, of course—and lots of these came from Africa itself—but at the end of the day the poor, the people who lived in Africa, so often had nothing to show for their labours, nothing. And that was not because they did not work hard—they did, they did—but because of something that was wrong which made it so hard for them to get anywhere, no matter how hard they tried. Botswana was fortunate, because it had diamonds and good government, and Mma Ramotswe was well aware of that, but her pride did not allow her to forget the suffering of others, which was there, not far away, a suffering which made mothers see their children fade away before their eyes, their little bodies thin and rickety. One could not forget that in the middle of all this plenty. One could not forget.

But now Mma Makutsi stopped, and took Mma Ramotswe by the arm, pointing to a shop window. A woman was peering into the window, a woman in a striped blue dress, and for a moment Mma Ramotswe thought that it was this woman who had attracted Mma Makutsi’s attention. Was she a client, perhaps, or somebody else who had come to the attention of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, one of those adulterous wives that men sometimes asked them to follow and report upon? But Mma Makutsi was not pointing at the woman, who now moved away from the window, but to the contents of the window display itself.

“Look, Mma Ramotswe,” she said. “Look over there!”

Mma Ramotswe looked into the window. There was a sale of some sort on, with large reductions, the window claimed. Indeed, shouted a sign within, the sale amounted to madness on the part of the shoe shop.

“Bargains,” said Mma Ramotswe. “There always seem to be so many bargains.”

But it was not the bargain shoes that had made Mma Makutsi stop and look—it was the full-price offerings, all neatly arrayed along a shelf and labelled Exclusive models, as worn in London and New York.

“You see that pair over there?” said Mma Makutsi, pointing into the window. “You see that pair? The blue pair?”