“A building, Charlie,” she had said. “Think of bricks. You need lots and lots of bricks to make a building.”

Charlie’s blank expression turned into a wry smile. “Oh, I know that, Mma. You need a lot of bricks to make a building. But what’s that got to do with investigations?”

“It’s the same thing, Charlie. You have to make the whole thing with lots of small things. So when you want to know the whole story of whatever it is you want to know about…”

“The whole story? What happened in the beginning?”

“Yes. And why it happened, and what happened next—then you need to know all the facts. And these facts might be very small. And they might seem to have nothing to do with the main question, but they can be very important.” She paused. “And all of that, Charlie, requires patience.”

“I know that, Mma. You don’t need to tell me.”

And now, sitting in the van with Charlie, who was looking ahead of them and not really paying much attention to where they currently were, she reflected on the possibility that young men were a completely alien breed, and that however much you tried to get them to see things the way you saw them, you were destined to fail. And that perhaps part of the secret of leading a life in which you would not always be worrying about things, or complaining about them, was to accept that there were people who just saw things differently from you and always would. Once you understood that, then you could accept the people themselves as they were and not try to change them. What was even more important, perhaps, was that you could love those people who looked at things so differently, because you realised that they were not trying to make life hard for you by being what they were, but were simply doing their best. Then, when you started to love them, love would do the work that it always did and it would begin to transform them and then they would end up seeing things in the same way that you did.

She told Charlie to stop.

“Where, Mma?” he asked as he pulled over. “That place over there?”

She pointed to a gate off the road a few yards ahead of them. “Look at that house, Charlie. See it?”

The short driveway behind the gate was largely obscured by trees that had been allowed to grow unrestrained. There were a couple of acacia trees, a bottlebrush tree with its red, feathery flowers, and a number of flame trees, with their elongated seed pods like desiccated flat loaves. Beyond that, only its roof visible from the road, was a house. From the style of the roof, which was of corrugated tin, it was clear that the house was an older one.

“Do you see the big tree?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

Charlie nodded. “And it’s a jacaranda, Mma?”