“She has gone somewhere else. I do not know where. All she did was leave a note to say that her deputy, Mma Paloi, is in charge now until the end of the month, when Mma Potokwane is due to go anyway. That is all she said.” The secretary paused, allowing this information to be absorbed. “I wondered if she was with you, Mma. You are her great friend. But obviously she is not.”

“No, she is not here. And I am very shocked, Mma, to hear this news. Mma Potokwane would normally never leave her post. Never. You know what she’s like.”

The secretary was quick to agree. “If she was on one of those big ships and it was going down, she would be the last one to jump off, Mma. That is very true.”

Mma Ramotswe could not help but picture it: Mma Potokwane standing on the deck of a ship waiting for everybody else to clamber into lifeboats and cast off. And perhaps Mma Makutsi would be beside her, clinging on to her certificate from the Botswana Secretarial College, anxious to save that from the encroaching waters. And then Mma Potokwane would jump into the last lifeboat and … and it would tilt precariously because of her weight and perhaps begin to sink, and again she would make sure that she was the last one to abandon ship, or she would even go down with the lifeboat, dutiful to the last; and the waters would swirl around with odd bits of detritus—spars of broken wood, unoccupied lifebelts, the framed certificate from the Botswana Secretarial College …

“Have you spoken to her husband?” she asked.

The secretary explained that Rra Potokwane had gone to spend some time with a cousin who needed help with his cattle. “He has no phone with him,” she went on, “and I cannot find the name of the cousin. I do not know how to contact him.”

Mma Ramotswe thought out loud. “I do not think she will have gone up to her husband. I do not think so.”

“No?”

“No, I do not think that she would do that. She does not like that cousin of her husband’s—she has spoken to me about that. She says he is a drunkard.”

“I have heard her say that too,” said the secretary. “She says that he eats too much as well. She told me that that cousin eats all the meat in the household and leaves none for his wife. That is what she said, Mma: I am only repeating what she said.”

Yes, she thought, there are men like that; men with fat bellies and thin wives and children.

“I have an idea, Mma.”

The secretary sounded relieved. “I knew that you would come up with something, Mma. I knew that you would know. You are the detective, you see …”