Tati Monyena laughed. “Of course. But that’s only because they cannot speak. I think that if they could, then they would probably lie too. Would a dog own up if some meat had been stolen? Would it say, I am the one who has eaten the meat? I do not think so.”

Mma Ramotswe wondered whether to join in this speculative conversation, but decided against it, and sat back until the two of them should finish. But Tati Monyena rose to his feet instead and gestured towards the door. “I shall take you to the ward,” he said. “You will see the bed where these things happened.”

They left his office and walked down a green-painted corridor. There was a hospital smell in the air, that mixture of humanity and disinfectant, and, in the background, the sound that seemed to go so well with that smell—voices somewhere, the sound of a child crying, the noise of wheels being pushed over uneven floors, the faint hum of machinery. There were posters on the wall: warnings about disease and the need to be careful; a picture of a blood spill. This, ultimately, was what our life was about, she thought, and hospitals were there to remind us: biology, human need, human suffering.

They passed a nurse in the corridor. She was carrying a pan of some sort, covered with a stained cloth, and she smiled and half-turned to let them pass. Mma Ramotswe kept her gaze studiously away from the pan and on the nurse’s face. It was a kind face, the sort that one trusted, unlike, she imagined, the face of the doctor whom Mr. Polopetsi had described.

“It’s changed since your father was here,” said Tati Monyena. “In those days we had to make do with so little. Now we have much more.”

“But there is never enough, is there?” said Mr. Polopetsi. “We get drugs for one illness and then a new illness comes along. Or a new type of the same thing. Same devil, different clothes. Look at TB.”

Tati Monyena sighed. “That is true. I was talking to one of the doctors the other day and he said, We thought that we had it cracked. We really did. And now…”

But at least we can try, thought Mma Ramotswe. That is all we can do. We can try. And that, surely, is what doctors did. They did not throw up their hands and give up; they tried.