FLORENCE PEKO, the sour and complaining maid of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, had suffered from headaches ever since Mma Ramotswe had first been announced as her employer’s future wife. She was prone to stress headaches, and anything untoward could bring them on. Her brother’s trial, for instance, had been a season of headaches, and every month, when she went to visit him in the prison near the Indian supermarket she would feel a headache even before she took her place in the shuffling queue of relatives waiting to visit. Her brother had been involved in stolen cars, and although she had given evidence on his behalf, testifying to having witnessed a meeting at which he had agreed to look after a car for a friend—a skein of fabrication—she knew that he was every bit as guilty as the prosecution had made him out to be. Indeed, the crimes for which he received his five-year prison sentence were probably only a fraction of those he had committed. But that was not the point: she had been outraged at his conviction, and her outrage had taken the form of a prolonged shouting and gesturing at the police officers in the court. The magistrate, who was on the point of leaving, had resumed her seat and ordered Florence to appear before her.

“This is a court of law,” she had said. “You must understand that you cannot shout at police officers, or anybody else in it. And moreover, you are lucky that the prosecutor has not charged you with perjury for all the lies you told here today.”

Florence had been silenced, and had been allowed free. Yet this only increased her sense of injustice. The Republic of Botswana had made a great mistake in sending her brother to jail. There were far worse people than he, and why were they left untouched? Where was the justice of it if people like … The list was a long one, and, by curious coincidence, three of the men on it were known by her, two of them intimately.

And it was to one of these, Mr Philemon Leannye, that she now proposed to turn. He owed her a favour. She had once told the police that he was with her, when he was not, and this was after she had received her judicial warning for perjury and was wary of the authorities. She had met Philemon Leannye at a take-out stall in the African Mall. He was tired of bar girls, he had said, and he wanted to get to know some honest girls who would not take his money from him and make him buy drinks for them.

“Somebody like you,” he had said, charmingly.