He had cavilled at the idea, but she mentioned the loan again, and he capitulated. He would go the following afternoon, at a time when everybody was at work. She had done her homework: there would not even be a maid at the house, and there was no dog.

“It couldn’t be easier,” she promised him. “You will get it done in fifteen minutes. In. Out.”

She handed him the parcel. The gun had been replaced in its wax-proof paper and this had been itself wrapped in a further layer of plain brown paper. The wrapping disguised the nature of the contents, but the parcel was still weighty and he was suspicious.

“Don’t ask,” she said. “Don’t ask and then you won’t know.”

It’s a gun, he thought. She wants me to plant a gun in that house in Zebra Drive.

“I don’t want to carry this thing about with me,” he said. “It is very dangerous. I know that it’s a gun and I know what happens to you if the police find you with a gun. I do not want to go to jail. I will fetch it from you at the Matekoni house tomorrow.”

She thought for a moment. She could take the gun with her to work, tucked away in a plastic bag. If he wished to fetch it from her from there, then she had no objection. The important thing was to get it into the Ramotswe house and then, two days later, to make that telephone call to the police.

“All right,” she said. “I will put it back in its bag and take it with me. You come at 2:30. He will have gone back to his garage by then.”

He watched her replace the parcel in the OK Bazaars bag in which it had first arrived.

“Now,” she said. “You have been a good man and I want to make you happy.”

He shook his head. “I am too nervous to be happy. Maybe some other time.”

THE FOLLOWING afternoon, shortly after two o’clock, Paul Monsopati, a senior clerk at the Gaborone Sun Hotel, and a man marked by the hotel management for further promotion, slipped into the office of one of the hotel secretaries and asked her to leave the room for a few minutes.

“I have an important telephone call to make,” he said. “It is a private matter. To do with a funeral.”

The secretary nodded, and left the room. People were always dying and funerals, which were eagerly attended by every distant relative who was able to do so, and by almost every casual acquaintance, required a great deal of planning.

Paul picked up the telephone receiver and dialled a number which he had written out on a piece of paper.

“I wish to speak to an Inspector,” he said. “Not a sergeant. I want an Inspector.”

“Who are you, Rra?”