She waited for him to say something more. She could not speak. Where? How? When? There were so many questions to be asked, but she could give voice to none of them; not now, here under the pawpaw tree, to this man whom she did not know very well, who was trying to be sympathetic but was awkward in his attempt.

“I want to go and see him,” she said at last, moving towards the car.

He shook his head. “No. The doctor said that we can see him tomorrow, but not until four o’clock. There is going to be an operation on his leg. His aunt is waiting at the hospital. She says that nobody else must come yet.”

She stared at him, struggling to take in what had happened. She dug her fingernails into her palms, a trick she had learned at school; one pain might cancel out another, might make the world different.

“How did this thing …”

Mr. Gaethele shook his head. “It was one of the delivery drivers. He reversed the truck into Mr. Radiphuti. He was standing in front of small wall, and it caught his leg against the wall. Like this.” He made a crushing movement with his hands.

Mma Makutsi held her hands up to her face. There would be tears, but not until she was ready to cry.

MMA RAMOTSWE did not hear about the incident at the Double Comfort Furniture Shop until the following morning. When she arrived at the office, Mma Makutsi was already there, sitting at her desk, sorting papers. As her employer entered, she did not look up, as she normally would. She was preoccupied with her work, Mma Ramotswe thought; there was nobody who could become quite as absorbed in filing papers as Mma Makutsi. Filing, she had once pronounced, is the greatest of the secretarial arts. And then she had said …

But something seemed not quite right, and Mma Ramotswe, about to open the window, turned round. “There is something wrong, isn’t there?”

Mma Makutsi shook her head—vigorously; so vigorously, in fact, that Mma Ramotswe’s suspicions were immediately confirmed.

“There is nothing wrong. Nothing.”

Mma Ramotswe left the window and crossed the room to Mma Makutsi’s desk. She laid her hand on the other woman’s shoulder, gently. “Mma, you can tell me.”

It must be Phuti, she thought, something to do with him. There had been that problem over the negotiation of the bride price, and she did not think that it had been resolved yet. That greedy uncle from Bobonong, that man with the broken nose who had sniffed the presence of money in the Radiphuti family and had travelled all the way down from the north like a greedy vulture. It was something to do with that, obviously.