MMA RAMOTSWE KNEW that the newspaper article might help and could, if they were lucky, bring an immediate result—at least in the search for Rosie. But there was more to the request that Susan had made of them. A reunion with Rosie might be her main ambition, but she had been at pains to stress that she was keen to find her old house and some of the children with whom she had been at school at Thornhill. These would not be easy things to discover, thought Mma Ramotswe, but she could at least make a start on the task while they were waiting for the outcome of the article.

They agreed on a division of labour. Mma Makutsi would handle any responses they had to the article, which would appear, Bandie assured them, in the following day’s edition of the newspaper. While she was doing this, Mma Ramotswe and Charlie, who was due back the following day from a family funeral, would set about the task of finding the house in which Susan’s family had lived. That done, they might be able to trace some of the neighbours from those days, and in this way start piecing together Susan’s cherished past. She was not optimistic, though; thirty years was a long time in human affairs anywhere, but it was a particularly long time in a city like Gaborone, which had grown so quickly. A sleepy small town, no more than a handful of streets, had become a city, with all that this entailed. It was still recognisably the same place, though, and its character had remained intact. So whatever they were able to serve up to Susan, even if it was only a few fragments, would, she imagined, ring true and bring back to her at least some of the childhood she was so keen to re-create.

That evening when she went home, Mma Ramotswe found Motholeli and Puso busy with Fanwell’s dog. Puso had resurrected an ancient floor brush and was grooming the dog, while his sister had refilled his water bowl and was feeding him scraps of bread spread with beef dripping.

Mma Ramotswe was touched by the sight. There was something particularly appealing, she thought, about children lavishing care on an animal. They were repaying, in a way, the love and care given to them; showing that the message that we should look after one another had not fallen on stony ground. A child who loved a pet was showing the love that would in due course be given to another, and that was a reassurance. Love was like rain; there could be periods of drought when it seemed that love would never return, would never make its presence felt again. In such times, the heart could harden, but then, just as droughts broke, so too could love suddenly appear, and heal just as quickly and completely as rain can heal the parched land.