“And you found something?” asked Mma Makutsi, as she poured the hot water into the old enamel teapot and swirled it around with the tea leaves.

“I found a feeling,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I felt that I knew something.”

Mma Makutsi listened to her employer. What did she mean by saying that she felt she knew something? Either you know something or you don’t. You can’t think that you might know something, if you didn’t actually know what it was that you were meant to know.

“I am not sure …” she began.

Mma Ramotswe laughed. “It’s called an intuition. You can read about it in Mr Andersen’s hook. He talks about intuitions. They tell us things that we know deep inside, but which we can’t find the word for.”

“And this intuition you felt at that place,” said Mma Makutsi hesitantly. “What did it tell you? Where this poor American boy was?”

“There,” said Mma Ramotswe quietly. “That young man is there.”

For a moment they were both silent. Mma Makutsi lowered the teapot onto the formica tabletop and replaced the lid.

“He is living out there? Still?”

“No,” said Mma Ramotswe. “He is dead. But he is there. Do you know what I am talking about?”

Mma Makutsi nodded. She knew. Any sensitive person in Africa would know what Mma Ramotswe meant. When we die, we do not leave the place we were in when we were alive. We are still there, in a sense; our spirit is there. It never goes away. This was something which white people simply did not understand. They called it superstition, and said that it was a sign of ignorance to believe in such things. But they were the ones who were ignorant. If they could not understand how we are part of the natural world about us, then they are the ones who have closed eyes, not us.

Mma Makutsi poured the tea and handed Mma Ramotswe her mug.

“Are you going to tell the American woman this?” she asked. “Surely she will say: ‘Where is the body? Show me the exact place where my son is.’ You know how these people think. She will not understand you if you say that he is there somewhere, but you cannot point to the spot.”

Mma Ramotswe raised the mug to her lips, watching her secretary as she spoke. This was an astute woman, she thought. She understood exactly how the American woman would think, and she appreciated just how difficult it could be to convey these subtle truths to one who conceived of the world as being entirely explicable by science. The Americans were very clever; they sent rockets into space and invented machines which could think more quickly than any human being alive, but all this cleverness could also make them blind. They did not understand other people. They thought that everyone looked at things in the same way as Americans did, but they were wrong. Science was only part of the truth. There were also many other things that made the world what it was, and the Americans often failed to notice these things, although they were there all the time, under their noses.