It was not this issue that Mma Ramotswe was thinking about, though; she was contemplating the delicacy of asking Mma Makutsi to do anything these days. She had hesitated before asking her to write the reply to the Chamber of Commerce invitation, but in the end that proved easy enough because it was something that Mma Makutsi was especially keen to do. The difficulty lay more in those routine tasks that she did not enjoy so much, or in respect of those instances that unambiguously involved one person giving an order and another complying. Was she still entitled to ask Mma Makutsi to take a letter that she dictated? That had been simple when Mma Makutsi had been the agency’s secretary, but as she had been promoted, becoming an assistant detective and then an associate director and then co-principal director (had she remembered that correctly?), could you say to a co-principal director, “Please take a letter, Mma Makutsi”?

Mma Ramotswe thought you could not. And yet if you could not ask Mma Makutsi to take dictation, then whom could you ask? Charlie? The problem with Charlie was his spelling, which was erratic. He was willing enough to transcribe what you said, but it took a great deal of time, as he had no knowledge of shorthand and wrote out every word with intense concentration and a frown on his brow that made one imagine that there was some fundamental problem with what was being said in the letter.

So if Mma Makutsi was too elevated now to perform ordinary secretarial tasks, and if Charlie, although willing, was not much good at them, what was she to do? Should she write her own letters? Many quite high-ranking people did that these days—Mma Makutsi had pointed out an article in a magazine she received, Secretarial News, which suggested that now the secretarial role had been transformed into an executive one, people who previously relied on others to type their letters were now typing them themselves. “That’s the future,” said Mma Makutsi. “That’s the way things have been going, and I spotted it a long time ago, Mma. It is not news to me.”

Of course none of this applied to filing. That was, as Mma Makutsi had often said, an art, and it was an art that she was both keen and proud to practise. Moreover it was not a skill that could be acquired by anybody—you had to have the right sort of mind to do it properly. “Some people think they can file, Mma,” she said, “but they are wrong. Filing is not a mechanical business—you have to understand why a particular letter should go in a particular file.”

But now the reply to the invitation had been typed and Mma Makutsi was reading through it. “I shall sign it for both of us,” she said. “That will save you the bother, Mma Ramotswe.”

“But it’s no real bother, Mma,” Mma Ramotswe said.