But this was a time for making lists, not for dreaming, and she sat at her desk and wrote down on a piece of paper, in order of their priority, the various matters which concerned her. At the top of the list she simply wrote blackmail, and under that she left a blank space. This was where ideas might be noted, and a few words were immediately scribbled in: Who could know? Then below that there was Mr Polopetsi. Mr Polopetsi himself was not a problem, but Mma Ramotswe had been moved by his description of his wealthy uncle and his cutting out of his nephew. That was an injustice, in her view, and Mma Ramotswe found it hard to ignore injustice. Under Mr Polopetsi’s name she wrote: Mean uncle—speak to him? Then there was Mokolodi, under which was written: something very odd going on. And then, finally, almost as an afterthought, she wrote: Phuti Radiphuti: Could I say something to him about Mma Makutsi? Her pencil poised at the end of the last question, she then added: Mind own business? And finally, she wrote: Find new shoes. That was simple, or at least it sounded simple; in reality the question of shoes could be a complicated one. She had been meaning for some time to buy herself a pair of shoes to replace the ones which she always wore to the office and which were becoming a bit down-at-heel. Traditionally built people could be hard on shoes, and Mma Ramotswe sometimes found it difficult to get shoes which were sufficiently well constructed. She had never gone in for fashionable shoes—unlike Mma Makutsi, with her green shoes with the sky-blue linings—but she wondered now whether she should not follow her assistant’s lead and choose shoes which were perhaps just slightly more elegant. It was a difficult decision to make, and it would require some thought, but Mma Makutsi might help her, and this would at least take her mind off her problems with Phuti Radiphuti.

She looked at her list, sighed, and let the slip of paper fall from her hand. These were difficult issues, indeed, and not one of them, as far as she could see, involved a fee. The trickiest one was undoubtedly the blackmail problem, and now that she had established that Poppy was unlikely to lose her job—for which she could hardly charge very much, if anything—there was no financial reason to become further involved. There was a moral reason, of course, and that would inevitably prevail, but the setting of wrong to right often brought no financial reward. She had sighed, but it was not a sigh of desperation; she knew that there would be other cases, lucrative ones in which bills could be sent to firms that could well afford to pay. And had they not just posted a whole raft of such bills, each of which would bring in a comfortable cheque? And was there not an awful lot of banging and clattering going on in the garage next door, all of which meant money in the till and food on several tables? So she could afford to spend the time, if she wanted to, on these unremunerative matters, and she need not feel bad about it.