“She is a very kind lady,” agreed Mma Makutsi. “But she is also very clever. She can tell when people are lying, just by looking at them. And she also knows how to deal with men.”

The neighbour sighed. “That is a very great talent,” she said. “I would like to be able to do that.”

Mma Makutsi agreed with this. That would be very good; and indeed it would be good to have just one man to deal with. Mma Ramotswe now had Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and this Malawian woman had a boyfriend, whom Mma Makutsi had seen coming to the house in the evenings. She herself had not yet found a man, apart from that one she had met at the Kalahari Typing School for Men and who had not lasted very long for some reason. After that she had made a rule: Never become emotionally involved with one of your typing students—a rule which was a variant on the advice which Mma Ramotswe had quoted from Clovis Andersen: Always keep your distance from your client; hugs and kisses never solved any cases, and never paid any bills.

Now the last part of that advice was very interesting, and Mma Makutsi had considered it at some length. She had no doubt that it was true that emotional involvement with a client would not help you to see a problem clearly, and would therefore not assist the solving of the case, but was it true to say that hugs and kisses never paid any bills? Surely one could argue the opposite of that. There were plenty of people who paid their way through life with hugs and kisses—the wives of rich men, for example, or at least some wives of some rich men. Mma Makutsi was in no doubt whatsoever that some of those glamorous girls who had been in her class at the Botswana Secretarial College, those girls who in some cases got scarcely fifty per cent in the College’s final examinations (against her own ninety-seven per cent); some of these girls had made a very astute calculation that the way to get on financially was to make sure that their hugs and kisses went to the right sort of man. And that, in their view, was the sort of man who was earning many thousands of pula a month and who drove an expensive car, preferably a Mercedes-Benz.

Mma Makutsi now wrote to her father about the meeting with this neighbour, but said nothing of the discussion about men, or Mma Ramotswe, or being a private detective; rather, she told him what the woman had cooked for her. Then she told him about the trouble she was having with ants in the new house, and that there seemed to be nothing that could be done. He would sympathise with her on that. Everybody in Botswana had experienced trouble with ants, and everybody had a view on what to do. But nobody ever succeeded: the ants always returned. Perhaps it was because they had been there before people had arrived and regarded it as their place. Perhaps the country should be called Botshoswane, rather than Botswana; this meant the Place of the Ants. No doubt that’s what the ants called it anyway.