Mma Ramotswe had thought of that and discounted the possibility. The encounter in the supermarket had been fraught, but it had mainly involved her and Mma Makutsi. Charlie had been in the background and had said nothing, which meant that in the heat of the altercation Violet probably barely noticed him.

“She won't recognise him,” she said. “And, anyway, even if she does, it won't matter. Even young men who work in garages need beds, don't they?”

“We all need a bed,” mused Mma Makutsi. “Everybody needs a bed.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. “That is certainly well known,” she said.

Mma Makutsi looked thoughtful. “One other thing, Mma. Why are you asking Charlie to do this? What do you hope to prove?”

“We'll see,” Mma Ramotswe replied. “Sometimes you don't know what you're looking for until you find it. Would you not agree, Mma?”

“I'm not sure, Mma. I would have to think about it.”

“Well, it's true,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It really is.”

THEY PARKED THE BLUE VAN outside the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, and while Charlie made his way inside, Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi sat in the cab of the van, the windows down for the heat. Fortunately, they had found some shade under one of those handy acacia trees that in the hot weather were to cars like honeycombs to bees. This one already had several vehicles nudged under its shade, but there was just enough room for the blue van.

After ten minutes, Mma Makutsi began to get anxious. “What is he doing in there, Mma? Do you think that he'll be trying out all sorts of chairs and things? Phuti says that some people come in just to sit in his comfortable chairs. He says that they often have no intention of buying anything. Sometimes he finds people asleep in the big armchairs and he has to wake them up.”

In bringing up the subject of chairs, she reminded herself of Phuti's promise to give her a new one for the office. She had not raised the matter again, and now was unsure what to do about it. The problem was that she felt that she could not have a new chair while her boss, Mma Ramotswe, still had an old one. And yet if she declined Phuti's offer, then he would surely be offended … It was all very difficult.

Mma Ramotswe, meanwhile, had been envisaging Phuti's customers sitting in those comfortable armchairs. “We all need to sit down,” she said.

“Yes, but not in chairs that don't belong to us,” countered Mma Makutsi. “That's the trouble with this country, Mma—there are too many people sitting down in other people's chairs.”

It was another of Mma Makutsi's odd statements—utterly unfounded in fact, Mma Ramotswe suspected, but not a point that she wished to argue. As far as she was concerned, if a chair was empty, then anybody should be welcome to sit in it. We should share our chairs, she felt. Maybe that was the real problem with the modern world—not enough of us were prepared to share our chairs. Yes, that was probably true, and she wondered whether she might not have a word with Bishop Mwamba and suggest that he talk about that in a future sermon. He could start off, perhaps, by asking the members of the congregation whether they had noticed how many chairs there were and how many of them were empty. That would get them thinking. But where would it go from there? That would be up to Bishop Mwamba, she decided: he was good at sermons, and he would surely find some way of deriving an important lesson from chairs.