“I'm watching. I just wanted you to remember, Mma, what I said yesterday. I said that I couldn't guarantee anything. I might not be able to fix your van.”

She knew that, and reassured him that she did not expect a miracle. But as they approached Harry Moloso's scrapyard, she found her heart beating noticeably faster. It was only two days since the van had been towed away, and she did not imagine that there was much that could have happened to it in that time. Yet it was possible. The van might already have been crushed in one of those machines that transformed a car body into a cube of compressed metal. That would be hard to bear—to see a tiny white cube where once there had been a living van.

“There's Harry Moloso's place,” said Fanwell, pointing at an untidy-looking yard with a corrugated-tin fence. “See it? It's a big place—it stretches all the way back there. Full of old cars, tractors, trucks—everything.”

They stopped at the gate, which was controlled by an elderly security guard in a khaki uniform. He came over and listened while Fanwell explained who they were and the nature of their errand. A barrier was raised—a gum-pole painted in red and white stripes—and they were in the yard.

“It is like the elephants' graveyard,” said Fanwell. “You know that place where elephants go to die. All those white bones. Here it is the skeletons of cars.”

Fanwell was drawing up beside the office, a small breeze-block construction painted in lime green and with a large sign attached. Harry Moloso, Mr. Metal Magnet. Metal Resurrection-Miracles Daily.

“He calls himself Mr. Metal Magnet,” said Fanwell, pointing to the sign. “That is a good name for a scrap merchant.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled weakly. She was gazing around the yard, looking for the tiny white van. At the back of the yard there were several old buses, wheel-less and listing heavily, their windows gaping holes; there were things behind them that she could not see from where she was standing. The tiny white van could easily be concealed there.

They walked up to the half-open door of the office.

“Ko, ko!” Mma Ramotswe called out.

A voice came from within. “I'm in here. Come in, Mma.”

They pushed at the door, which moved back on protesting hinges. For a rich man, as everybody said Harry Moloso was, he had not spent much money on his office. Here and there on the floor, some in small pools of oil, were engine parts, wrenched from old engines, wires and pipes, like discarded innards; elsewhere there were piles of papers, of trade directories and spare parts manuals, unfiled letters. It was like Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni's office in the old days, before she and Mma Makutsi had jointly tackled it, but considerably worse than that.

“Dumela, Rra,” began Mma Ramotswe. “You are Harry Moloso?”

The man sitting on a bench seat salvaged from an old car rose to his feet when they entered. He had been reading a newspaper, which he now folded and tossed down on a desk.