“And what did it conclude?” she asked.

Dr Cronje rolled his eyes up in a gesture which indicated contempt for internal enquiries. “Nothing,” he said. “Absolutely nothing. The trouble was that some people could not bring themselves to admit the obvious. So the enquiry petered out. Technically it hasn’t been wound up.”

The waitress now brought them their drinks: a pot of bush tea for Mma Ramotswe and a cup of coffee for the doctor. Mma Ramotswe poured her tea and took a first sip.

“What do you think it should have decided?” she asked. “What if you had been on it?”

The doctor smiled—for the first time, thought Mma Ramotswe—and it was not a smile that lasted long.

“I was,” he said.

“You were?”

“I was a member of the enquiry. It was the hospital superintendant, Mr. Monyena, one of the senior staff nurses, somebody nominated by Chief Linchwe, and me. That was it.”

Mma Ramotswe took another sip of tea. Somebody had started to play music inside the restaurant, and for a few seconds she thought she recognised the tune as one that had been played by Note Mokoti, her former husband. She caught her breath; Note was over, gone, but when she heard his music, the tunes he liked to play, which she sometimes did, a tinge of pain could come. But it was a different tune, something like one that he played, but different.

“When you say that there was something very obvious that people could not admit, what was that, Rra?”

The doctor reached out and touched the rim of his coffee cup, idly drawing a finger round it. “Natural causes,” he said. “Cardiac and pulmonary failure in two of the cases. Renal in the other. Case closed, Mma…Mma…”

He had already used her name, but she supplied it again. “Ramotswe.”

“Ramotswe. Sorry.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Then the doctor looked up into the tree, as if trying to find something. She saw the green eyes moving, searching. The green eyes were from the Afrikaner, but the softness of his face, a masculine softness but a softness nonetheless, came from the mother, came from Africa.

“So there’s really nothing further to be done about it,” Mma Ramotswe said gently.

The doctor did not reply for a moment; he was still looking up into the tree above them. “In my view, no,” he said. “But that won’t stop the talk, the pointing of fingers.”

“At?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

“Me,” he said. He looked down again and their eyes met. “Yes, me. There are people in the hospital who say that I’m bad luck. They look at me in that way…you know, that way which people use here. As if they’re a bit frightened of you. They say nothing, but they look.”