She made her way to the verandah that lined the building in which Mma Potokwane had her office. The door leading off into the office was open, and she could see that nobody was within. A fan had been left on, though, and was whirring away industriously. That meant that Mma Potokwane would not be far away—a counter of thebes every bit as much as pula, she would not waste electricity for long. Many of the goods supplied to the orphan farm she begged and borrowed from businessmen in the town, but you could not do that with electricity. There was no human face to the electricity board, no manager whom one could negotiate a lower price with or sweet-talk with a promise of some future favour. The electricity board charged a set amount for electricity, and if you used it, you had to pay for it. There was no way round that, as there was with other bills. You can’t be charging the poor orphans that much was one of Mma Potokwane’s favourite lines, regularly invoked against traders who supplied the orphan farm with its needs, and it was often highly successful. But you could not say that to an electricity board that had no shame, no sense of what it was like to be an orphan.

Mma Ramotswe decided to go in search of the matron rather than stay in her office and wait for her to return. She did not like to sit unattended in another’s office—even if invited, explicitly or implicitly. There was always the feeling, she thought, that the person whose office it was would think that you had sneaked a look at the papers on the desk, which was what some inquisitive people did, no matter how hard it was to read upside down. And that notion reminded her of Clovis Andersen, who had written—had he not?—in The Principles of Private Detection, something about learning to read upside down. It came back to her now, from that section of the book that dealt with the skills that a good detective should try to master. “Being able to read in a poor light puts one at a great advantage over those who cannot,” he wrote. “There have been many occasions when I have been able to glean information from a document which would be too poorly lit to be legible to most. And the same ability has seen me safely through a number of tricky, not to say perilous, situations.” And what, she wondered, were those? Now she could ask him, of course, although he would only be able to tell her about them as long as disclosure on his part would not compromise the strict rules of confidentiality that he set out elsewhere in the book.