Mma Ramotswe gripped her tea cup. Mma Makutsi must have told him, or perhaps it was Mr Polopetsi. This should not surprise her: there were few secrets in a business that small.

“He did,” she said, sighing. “He came and asked me for some money. I am going to give it to him—just to get him to go away.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni nodded. “It is often like that with such people,” he said. “They come back. But you have to be careful. If you give them money, then they might just ask for more and more.”

Mma Ramotswe knew that what he said was true. She would tell Note that there would be no more money, and next time, if he came to see her again, she would refuse him. Or would she? What if he were to threaten her again with the police? Surely she would do anything rather than face the shame which that would involve?

“I will give him this money and tell him not to come back,” she said. “I do not want to see him again.”

“All right,” he said. “But you must be careful.”

She looked at him. They had not spoken at any length, and she had kept the real truth from him, but even so she felt better after this brief airing of her worry. Now she could ask about him.

“What about you?” she said.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni groaned. “Oh dear,” he said. “I am in a bad mess. I have discovered something about my house.”

Mma Ramotswe frowned. She knew that tenants were always a risk. They treated furniture with disrespect; they burned holes in the floor and on the edge of tables with their cigarettes. She had even heard of a farmhouse not far from town which had been rented by python smugglers. Some of the pythons had escaped and taken up residence in the roof even after the tenants had been evicted. One of these had almost succeeded in taking the owners’ baby when they returned. The father had gone into the bedroom and had found the python lying on the baby, its jaws opened wide around its feet. He had saved the child, but both of them had been badly bitten by the python’s needle-like teeth.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was unlikely to have pythons in his house, of course, but it was obviously something troublesome, nonetheless. She looked at him expectantly.

“It’s being used as a shebeen,” he blurted out. “I did not know this. I would not have allowed it to be a shebeen. But that is what it is.”

Mma Ramotswe let out a hoot of laughter. “Your house? A shebeen?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked at her slightly reproachfully. “I do not think it is funny,” he said.