Clovis Andersen was right about that, as he was about so much, and Mma Ramotswe suspected that Mma Potokwane, with all her experience of children, would concur. One of the children at the orphan farm had happened to witness a burglary in a neighbouring house, and Mma Potokwane had sat with the child while he made the statement to the police. The boy, who was barely seven, had said that the man he saw breaking in through the window was Santa Claus. The police had tried to shift him from this, but he was adamant. “It was Santa Claus,” he had said.

So now, affecting nonchalance, Mma Ramotswe sought to elicit information about the player who had smiled when the opposition had scored a goal. “Oh, I expect he was smiling about something else,” she said. “Perhaps he was remembering a joke, or something like that. I don't think it's very important, anyway.”

“I don't think he was thinking of a joke,” said Puso solemnly. “He was smiling because the Township Rollers had scored a goal. I'm sure he was, Mma.”

Mma Ramotswe shrugged, as if to suggest that the matter was not very important. “Who was he, by the way? Did you see which player it was?”

Puso scratched his head. “I think it was Quickie Chitamba,” he said. “Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was another man who looked like Quickie.” He paused. “No, I don't think it was Quickie.”

“Oh well,” said Mma Ramotswe.

CHAPTER EIGHT

VIOLET SEPHOTHO STARTS WORK

ON THE MONDAY following the Kalahari Swoopers' ignominious defeat by the Township Rollers, a new employee presented herself for work at Mr. Phuti Radiphuti's Double Comfort Furniture Shop. This was none other than Violet Sephotho, formerly an undistinguished student at the Botswana Secretarial College, where she definitely did not get the eighty per cent that she had claimed at her interview. It was the same Violet Sephotho whom Mma Makutsi had met again at the Botswana Academy of Dance and Movement, the Tuesday evening dance class at the President Hotel, where Violet, determined to belittle someone who had done so much better in the college exams, had shown herself at her most disparaging and condescending.

It was also the same Violet Sephotho with whom Mma Makutsi had subsequently crossed swords on two occasions. The first of these had been when Mma Makutsi had rather too hastily tendered her resignation to Mma Ramotswe and had gone to an employment agency to find another job, only to discover that the agency was run by Violet. This, of course, gave Violet the opportunity to make snide and cutting remarks about the harshness of the current employment climate to women who were not very prepossessing in their appearance—by which she meant Mma Makutsi herself—and to suggest that perhaps she should look for a job outside Gaborone, in a place like Lobatse, possibly, where standards were not so high. An unfashionable-looking person, she suggested, could find a job in Lobatse even if she could not do so in Gaborone.