Puso nodded. “I was allowed to hold the ball while they were waiting to go on. Some of them talked to me.”

She began to peel another onion. She was not really interested in football any more, now that she had written her report and was intending to bring the investigation to an unsatisfactory conclusion. But Puso was, and she was listening with half an ear. “And what did they say?” she asked.

“Most of them said they didn't like their boots,” he said. “One of them said that they were very uncomfortable, and the others all joined in.”

Mma Ramotswe hesitated. She put down the onion.

“They said that their boots were uncomfortable?”

“Yes. They said that Mr. Molofololo had made them wear boots that a sponsor had given them. They said that they had been wearing them for six months and they were still uncomfortable. I thought they looked very nice …”

Mma Ramotswe looked out of the window. It was so obvious. So obvious. But then the solutions to complex problems were often such simple things. If you wore uncomfortable boots, then how could you play good football? Of course you cannot—everybody, even a woman who owned a detective agency and who came from Mochudi and who had a fine mechanic for a husband, and two children who loved her although she was not their real mother, and who was the daughter of a man called Obed Ramotswe—even such a woman, with absolutely no knowledge of football, and no interest in it—even she would know that.

Then she remembered something, and the remembering of it struck her so forcefully that she found herself holding her breath, almost afraid to breathe. Of course. Of course. Mr. Molofololo had made that strange remark, right at the beginning: I am the one. It is me. He knew! He knew—on one level—that he was the problem, and it had slipped out. He knew but did not know, as was often the case with a person's own faults. We know what is wrong, but we cannot bring ourselves to admit it. She had helped clients like that before—people who really knew the answer to their problems but wanted somebody else to help them admit it. She breathed out. Yes. Yes.

She turned round and suddenly picked Puso up and hugged him. It was exactly the sort of gesture that a small boy would find acutely embarrassing—that they would run away from to avoid— but he suffered it. “You clever, clever boy!”

The boy's embarrassment turned to puzzlement. “Why, Mma?”

“Oh, Puso, it is a very big case that you have just solved. What … what treat would you like? Tell me.”

He looked up at her. “Ice cream,” he said. “Lots of it.”

“There will be ice cream,” she said. “We shall go right now. In the van. Ice cream—lots and lots of ice cream. More than you can eat—I promise you.”

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY MORNING, at eleven o'clock, Mma Ramotswe drove out to the orphan farm to have tea with Mma Potokwane. She had received no specific invitation, and when she left the office of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency she had no idea even that the matron would be in. But in the event she received her usual warm greeting from her friend, who was standing in front of her office in an apparently idle moment.