“No, Mma, I am the grateful one,” said Mma Makutsi. “You are the person who has given me everything. You gave me a job when I was finding it difficult to get one—in spite of getting—”

“Ninety-seven per cent,” supplied Mma Ramotswe helpfully.

“Exactly, Mma. Ninety-seven per cent, and it was still impossible to find anything. When some of those girls who got barely fifty per cent at the Botswana Secretarial College, girls such as—”

“Violet Sephotho,” Mma Ramotswe contributed.

“Precisely, Mma. She is the big example. Anyway, you are the one who took me on and made me into a detective. You are the one, Mma, and I shall be grateful to you until the day I die. Right up to that day and beyond, Mma.”

For a moment Mma Ramotswe imagined Mma Makutsi in heaven, dressed in white, as people were thought to be clad there, her large glasses somehow more luminous, more reflecting, than in the mere light of this earth … Mma Makutsi sitting, perhaps ready to take dictation from the Lord himself … It was a ridiculous thought, but she could not help herself from thinking it, and it made her smile.

The advent of Phuti had certainly changed Mma Makutsi’s fortunes, but those had improved slightly anyway by the time of their first meeting. This improvement had come from two sources: the giving by Mma Makutsi of typing lessons to men, and the gradual growth in the revenues of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which had resulted in a number of pay rises. This had led to her moving to rather better accommodation, and to the eventual overhaul of her wardrobe, particularly in that department dearest to her, the department of shoes.

There were a number of possible reasons for Mma Makutsi’s attachment to shoes. One of these was profound: as a young girl, she had had none, and she remembered looking with envy at those so placed as to afford them. At the age of eight she was still unshod—which was not unusual in a remote village in that rather hard part of the country. But over the next year or so, shoes started to appear on the feet of other members of her class at school, and her heart ached, ached, for a pair. The other children’s shoes tended to be hand-me-downs—nobody had new shoes then—and Grace Makutsi would have been content even with handed-down hand-me-downs. But she had to wait, though a sympathetic friend lent her a pair of shoes for the duration of her birthday—blissful, remembered hours, even if the shoes in question were slightly too small and pinched her feet in places.