“That is very bad,” he said. “I do not like the thought that there was this strange man in our bedroom without any trousers.”

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But you must remember that he did not take them off himself. They came off when he was trying to escape. That is different.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked doubtful. “I still don’t like it. Why was he there? What mischief was he planning?”

“I suspect that he was just a thief who passed by and saw that nobody was in,” suggested Mma Ramotswe. “Then he was disturbed when I came back and he had no way of getting out. I suspect that he was a very frightened man.”

They did not discuss the matter further. The trousers were left out on the verandah, where Mma Ramotswe had hung them. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had suggested that they might fit one of the apprentices and he could give them to him. If they did not, then he would pass them on to one of the second-hand clothes traders who would surely find a good pair of legs to fit into them; honest legs this time.

But the next morning, when Mma Ramotswe went out onto the verandah for her morning cup of bush tea, the trousers had gone. And directly below the place where they had been left, there was a large, yellow pumpkin, luscious and ready to eat.

CHAPTER THREE

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON PUMPKINS

MMA RAMOTSWE inspected the pumpkin from all angles. There was nothing about pumpkins in Clovis Andersen’s Principles of Private Detection, but Mma Ramotswe was perfectly capable of investigating a pumpkin herself without the need of guidance from others. She did not touch it at first, but peered at the pumpkin itself, and then at the ground around it. The pumpkin had been placed in what was nominally a flower bed, but which had not been cultivated very much since Mma Ramotswe had moved into the house. She devoted herself to vegetables and shrubs, holding the view that flowers required too much effort and gave too little reward. In the hot air of Botswana flowers tended to open briefly and then shut and wilt away, as if surprised, unless, of course, one protected them with shade netting and coaxed them daily with precious water. It was far better, thought Mma Ramotswe, to allow native plants to establish themselves. These plants knew the soil of Botswana and could cope with the sun. They knew when it was time to blossom and when it was time to hide away; they knew how to make the most of every little drop of moisture that came their way.

The bed in which the pumpkin sat ran along the low front wall of the verandah. It was mostly sand, but there were a few plants, small aloes and the like, which had taken root, and it was alongside one of these that the pumpkin had been deposited. Mma Ramotswe looked at the sand around the pumpkin: for the most part it was undisturbed, save for the tiny tracks made by ants, but there, clearly visible, a few feet away from the pumpkin was the print of a shoe—that was all; just the indentations of a shoe-sole, which told one nothing, other than that the person who put the pumpkin there was a man, judging from the size, and that he possessed a pair of shoes.