For a few moments neither of them said anything. Mma Ramotswe looked out of the window, at the tree outside, and beyond that at the sky, which was an empty light blue, endless, endless. A large bird, a buzzard perhaps, was circling on high on a current of air, a tiny, soaring point of black, looking for food, of course, as all of us did, in one way or another.

She looked away from the sky and back towards Mma Potokwane, who was watching her, the faintest of smiles playing about her lips.

“Temptation is very difficult,” said Mma Ramotswe quietly. “I do not always resist it. I am not a strong woman in that respect.”

“I am glad you said that,” said Mma Potokwane. “I am not strong either. For example, right at the moment, I am thinking of cake.”

“And so am I,” confessed Mma Ramotswe.

Mma Potokwane stood up and shouted to the girl outside. “Two more pieces of cake, please. Two big slices.”

THE CAKE FINISHED and the tray tidied away, they settled down with their mugs of tea to continue the conversation. Mma Ramotswe thought that she would begin with the puzzle of the pumpkin, which had been rather forgotten about in all the recent excitement, but which was still something of a mystery. So she told Mma Potokwane about the disturbing experience of finding herself in the house with an intruder, and then the even more alarming discovery that the intruder was under her bed.

Mma Potokwane shrieked with laughter when Mma Ramo-tswe described how the intruder’s trousers had been caught on a bedspring.

“You might have crushed him, Mma,” she said. “You could have broken his ribs.”

Mma Ramotswe thought that the same might be said of any intruder who was unwise enough to hide under Mma Potokwane’s bed, but she did not point this out.

“But then the next morning,” she went on, “I found a beautiful pumpkin in front of the house. Somebody had taken the trousers and left a pumpkin in the place of the trousers. What do you make of that, Mma?”

Mma Potokwane frowned. “You have decided that the pumpkin was put there by the person who took the trousers, but are they connected? Might the pumpkin and the trousers be two quite separate matters? You have a pumpkin person, who brings the pumpkin—while the trousers are still there—and then you have a trousers person who takes the trousers and does not touch the pumpkin. That might be what happened.”

“But who would bring a pumpkin and leave it there without any explanation?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “Would you do such a thing?”

Mma Potokwane scratched her head. “I do not think that I would leave a pumpkin at somebody’s house unless I told them why. You would leave a message with the pumpkin, or you would tell the person later: that was me who left that pumpkin there.”