The man shook his head, and then wiped at his eyes with the back of a hand.

“I am not hurt,” he said. “I am shaken, but I am not hurt.”

“I was looking at something else,” said Mma Ramotswe, reaching out to take the man’s hand. “It was very silly of me. I took my eyes off the road, and then suddenly I saw you.”

The man said nothing. Turning to his bicycle, he picked it up. The front wheel, which must have been caught in a rut in the ground, was now slightly twisted, and the handlebars were at a strange angle. He looked mutely at the bicycle, before trying, unsuccessfully, to straighten the handlebars.

Mma Ramotswe turned and beckoned to Mma Makutsi to come out of the van. She had been holding back, out of a mixture of tact and embarrassment, but now she appeared and made a sympathetic remark to the man.

“I will take you to where you are going,” said Mma Ramo-tswe. “We can put the bike in the back of the van and then I shall take that to your place, wherever that is.”

The man pointed back towards Tlokweng. “I live over that way,” he said. “I would prefer to go home now. I do not want to go to the other place.”

They lifted up the bicycle together and placed it in the back of the van. Then Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi got into the tiny white van on one side and the man on the other. With the three of them in the cab, there was barely enough room for Mma Ramotswe to change gear, and each time she did it she dug Mma Makutsi in the ribs.

“This is not a big van,” Mma Ramotswe said brightly to their passenger. “But it always goes. So it will get us to Tlokweng very easily.”

She looked sideways at the man. He looked as if he was in his late forties. He had a good face, she thought; an intelligent face, the face of a teacher, perhaps, or of a senior clerk. And he spoke well too, enunciating each word clearly, as if he meant it. So many people spoke carelessly these days, she thought, running their words together so that it was sometimes quite difficult to make out what they were saying. And as for people on the radio, these so-called disc jockeys, they spoke as if they had hiccups. Presumably they thought that it was fashionable to talk like this; that it made them more alluring, which it probably did if one was star-struck, and with nothing much in one’s head, but which only sounded ridiculous to her.

“I will have your bicycle fixed for you,” she said to the man. “It will be made as good as new. I promise you that.”

The man nodded. “I cannot pay myself,” he said. “I have not got the money for that.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. She had thought as much. In spite of all the progress which Botswana had made, and in spite of the prosperity which the diamonds had brought to the country, there were still many, many poor people. They should not be forgotten. But why was this man, who seemed to be educated, not in a job? She knew that there were many people who could not find a job, but usually these were people who had no skills. This man did not seem to be like that.