She looked down at the broken shoe, now resting on her lap. It was such a sad thing, that shoe, like a body from which the life had gone. She stared at it. Almost challenging it to reproach her. But it did not, and all she heard, she thought, was a strangled voice which said, Narrow escape, Boss. You were walking in the wrong direction, you know. We shoes understand these things.

IF IT HAD BEEN a bleak morning for Mma Makutsi, it was equally bleak at the premises of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. In Mma Ramotswe’s small office the desk previously occupied by Mma Makutsi stood forlorn, bare of paper, with only a couple of pencils and an abandoned typewriter upon it. Where three cups had stood on the cabinet behind it, along with the tea-making equipment of a kettle and two tea-pots, there now were only two—Mma Ramotswe’s personal cup and the cup that was kept for the client. The absence of Mma Makutsi’s cup, a small thing in itself but a big thing in what it stood for, seemed only to confirm in Mma Ramotswe’s view that the heart had been taken out of the office. Steps could be taken, of course: Mr. Polopetsi could be invited to keep his mug there rather than on the hook which it occupied beside the spanners in the garage. But it would not be the same; indeed it was impossible to imagine Mr. Polopetsi occupying Mma Makutsi’s chair; much as Mma Ramotswe liked him, he was a man, and the whole ethos of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, its guiding principle really, was that it was a business in which women were in the driving seat. That was not because men could not do the job—they could, provided they were the right sort of men, observant men—it was simply because that particular business had always been run by women, and it was women who gave it its particular style. There was room in this world, Mma Ramotswe thought, for things done by men and things done by women; sometimes men could do the things done by women, sometimes not. And vice versa, of course.