“Bang!” said Puso. “There will be a big noise and bits of them will be all over the place. That will be the end of them.”

That will be the end of them. She had noticed that this was an expression that Puso used quite frequently, and in all sorts of situations. Usually there was an element of justice in it: people got their just deserts, and that would be the end of them. Or they would lose an argument, and that would be the end of them too. It was catching, and she found herself using it herself, telling Mma Makutsi that somebody she suspected of dishonesty would run into trouble one day, and that would be the end of him. Mma Makutsi had agreed, and added, “And not before time, Mma.”

She hesitated at the fence, but only briefly. Bending down, she pulled two strands sufficiently apart to squeeze herself through. Am I really doing this? she asked herself. Is this really Mma Ramotswe, respectable citizen, climbing through a fence in the middle of the night? Is this what a traditionally built woman should be doing? She almost laughed at the thought—it was that absurd. But she had committed herself; she was now in her neighbour’s garden and had her task ahead of her.

That task was clear enough. It had been a long time ago—over thirty years—but Rosie had said that she had laid stones around the grave of Susan’s pet dog. Well, if these stones were sufficiently large—the sorts of stones used to mark the boundaries of flower beds—then there was a possibility that they would still be there. Her neighbour’s garden had been untended for years, with beds left uncultivated and plants allowed to grow unrestrained. There was even a clump of prickly pears that other neighbours had begged Vain Kwele to remove: once those got onto the land they could run rife. But he had done nothing, with the result that the prickly pears had colonised a whole section of his yard, making for an ugly and impenetrable corner. Down at the end of the garden, though, running along the front fence, was a line of random shrubs, self-seeded for the most part, that was less inhospitable than the rest. It was here that she would find what she was looking for—if it was to be found at all.

Playing the steadily weakening beam of the flashlight on the ground in front of her, she made her way along the front of the garden. Something caught the light at her feet—an empty beer bottle, tossed across the fence by some passer-by; and something small and dark that moved—a dung beetle labouring with its trophy towards its home. She stepped sideways to avoid disturbing it and held the flashlight closer to the ground in the hope of getting a better view of where she was putting her feet.