MMA MAKUTSI HAD informed Mma Ramotswe that she would not be coming into the office until mid-morning the next day. It was an announcement rather than a request, and reflected a subtle change in the internal arrangements of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. This change was not threatening in any way: Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi had always got along together very well, even if it occasionally had to be made clear—in the gentlest way—that Mma Ramotswe was the head of the agency and Mma Makutsi was not. There had also been a disparity in status. Not that this was anything upon which Mma Ramotswe would ever be inclined to founder, but in the past there had been no escaping the fact that while Mma Ramotswe was the wife of a prominent mechanic and garage owner, the daughter of a highly regarded man who knew a great deal about cattle, and a pioneering—indeed the only—private detective in Botswana, Mma Makutsi was none of these things. She had not exactly come from nowhere—Bobonong was not nowhere, even if it could hardly be described as somewhere—but her place, her family, her village all seemed a very long way from Gaborone. And her material circumstances had been very different too. When she emerged from the Botswana Secretarial College she had very little: a couple of dresses and one and a half pairs of shoes, one shoe having been lost in a move from one rented room to another. And to have one and a half pairs of shoes is effectively to have only one pair, unless, of course, the single shoe could in some way be considered a potential substitute for one shoe of the complete pair. This, however, would require that they match, which is rarely the case.

Mma Makutsi had borne her straitened circumstances with dignity. Mma Ramotswe had never heard her complain—not once, not even when, towards the end of the month in those last, trying days before payday, she knew that Mma Makutsi’s purse was empty, or close to empty. Mma Makutsi would never ask for an advance on next month’s pay, and had declined such offers when Mma Ramotswe had made them.

“If there’s one thing they taught us at the Botswana Secretarial College,” she explained, “it is this: never take from next month what belongs to next month. That is a good rule, Mma, and if more people paid attention to it, then we would not be in the trouble we are in today.”

Mma Ramotswe was not sure that they were in trouble. Some people were undoubtedly in trouble, but not everyone; yet she knew what Mma Makutsi meant in a general sense, and was ready to agree.