“No buts, Mma,” said Mma Makutsi. “Some people are just skellums. That’s the way it is, Mma. That’s just the way it is.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled. It was some time since she had heard the word skellum, as it seemed to have passed out of favour. Yet it was such a fine word, that so effectively described a rogue or a rascal; a word that her father had used eloquently, picked up from the Boers, when describing dealers who paid poor farmers too little for their cattle, or traders who doctored their scales so that they could give short shrift to buyers of sorghum or maize meal. Obed Ramotswe had seen these as skellums and would call them that to their face; now, perhaps, the skellums could get away with it because people were afraid to stand up to them, or were no longer sure what was right or wrong, or were afraid to identify wickedness or sleaze when they saw it. Mma Makutsi may be a bit extreme at times, she thought, but at least she speaks up against bad behaviour. She was probably right about this woman, who had made some bad mistakes in her story and probably was what Obed, once again, would have called a chancer, if not a skellum. And if she was right, then Mma Makutsi’s unmasking of her was probably the right thing to do, and yet, and yet…life was rarely as simple as Mma Makutsi thought it was. Subtlety, wrote Clovis Andersen, is the best aid to the understanding of human complexity. That was rather too long a pronouncement to use too often, but it had its place, and should be remembered, as she was doing now, from time to time.

CHAPTER NINE

TRUST YOUR NOSE

MR. J.L.B. MATEKONI sniffed at the air. There was no doubt about it—Mma Ramotswe was making his favourite stew. The aroma, detected even as he set foot on the stoep, was unmistakable, and enough to get the gastric juices going in anticipation. Onions were the key to that: the recipe, developed specially for him by Mma Ramotswe, advised by Mma Potokwane, involved onions chosen for their smallness and sweetness—“not these football-sized onions they try to sell us,” warned Mma Potokwane. These were gently softened in sunflower oil flavoured with a pinch of chilli flakes, and then the beef, fine Botswana grass-fed beef—“none better anywhere in the world,” claimed Mma Potokwane—was added in small pieces. This was then sealed before the addition of stock and a small quantity of chopped ostrich biltong, the dried and salted meat that people considered such a delicacy.