She left the sitting room and walked slowly down the corridor to check the other rooms. There was a large walk-in cupboard a few paces along the corridor, and she stopped before this, peering gingerly past the edge of its door, which was slightly ajar. It was dark in the cupboard, but she could just make out the shapes of the items it contained: the two buckets, the sewing machine, the coats that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had brought with him and hung on the rail at the back. Nothing seemed out of place, and there was certainly no intruder hiding in the coats. So she closed the door and went on until she came to the first of the three rooms that gave off the corridor. This was Puso’s room, which was very much a boy’s room, with little in it. She opened the door cautiously, gritting her teeth as the door creaked loudly. She looked at the table, on which a home-made catapult was resting, and the floor, on which a discarded football and a pair of running shoes lay, and she realised that no intruder would come in here anyway. Motholeli’s room also was empty, although here Mma Ramotswe thought it necessary to peer into the cupboard. Again there was nothing untoward.

Now she entered the bedroom she shared with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. This was the largest of the three bedrooms, and it contained things that somebody might well wish to steal. There were her clothes, for instance, which were colourful and well-made. There would be a keen demand for these from larger ladies looking for dresses, but there was no sign that the hanging rail on which these garments were suspended had been tampered with. And nor was there any sign of disturbance on the dressing table on which Mma Ramotswe kept the few brooches and bangles that she liked to wear. None of these seemed to have gone.

Mma Ramotswe felt the tension leave her body. The house was obviously empty and the notion that somebody might be hiding in it was manifestly nonsense. There was probably some perfectly rational explanation for the open drawer and the ball of string on the dresser, and this explanation would no doubt emerge when Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and the children returned that evening. One possibility was that they had set off, forgotten some-thing, and then come back to the house after Mma Ramotswe had herself left it. Perhaps they had bought a present for Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s relative and had come back to wrap it up, a task for which they would have needed the string. That was a perfectly rational explanation.

As Mma Ramotswe made her way back to the kitchen to make her tea, she thought of how things that appeared to be mysteries were usually no such thing. The unexplained was unexplained not because there was anything beyond explanation, but simply because the ordinary, day-to-day explanation had not made itself apparent. Once one began to enquire, so-called mysteries rapidly tended to become something much more prosaic. Not that people liked this, of course. They liked to think that there were things beyond explanation—supernatural things—things like tokoloshes, for example, who roamed at night and caused fear and mischief. Nobody ever saw a tokolosh for the simple reason that there was nothing to see. What one thought was a tokolosh was usually no more than a shadow of a branch in the moonlight, or the sound of the wind in the trees, or a tiny animal scurrying through the undergrowth. But people were not attracted by these perfectly straightforward explanations and spoke instead of all sorts of fanciful spirits. Well, she would not be like that when it came to intruders. There had been no intruder in the house at all, and Mma Ramotswe was quite alone, as she had originally thought herself to be.