“Yes,” said Mma Potokwane. “I have had bad news. Not bad news that somebody has become late—not that sort of bad news. No, the bad news is that I have been dismissed. As from the end of this month. Dismissed.”

It took Mma Ramotswe some time to absorb this. You did not dismiss Mma Potokwane. You did not tell her that she was no longer going to be the matron of the orphan farm. You did not do it because it was simply inconceivable. You did not dismiss the sun from the sky. You did not tell the Limpopo River to flow the other way. You did not say to the great Kalahari that it was not wanted; that its winds, its dry, desert winds should blow somewhere else, in another quarter, beneath another sky. You did not do that because it was against the order of things. And it was quite against the order of things that Mma Silvia Potokwane, matron, matriarch, scourge of businessmen slow to open their wallets for charity, defender of children, citizen of Botswana, should be dismissed from her position like some young and incompetent girl. You did not do that. Nobody did that. It was impossible.

“Has this thing really happened?” Mma Ramotswe stuttered.

Mma Potokwane nodded. No words were needed; just a nod was sufficient to signify the end of an era, the end of a world.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

AN INNOCENT MAN, A FIRST OFFENDER

IT WOULD HAVE been bad enough if that was all that had happened that day, but there was something else. Later, when Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi would survey their list of days—happily few in number—when things appeared to go seriously wrong, then this day would seem egregious.

It was while Mma Ramotswe was on her visit to the orphan farm that Mma Makutsi heard raised voices outside the office. This was not altogether unusual: the apprentices sometimes engaged in rowdy banter with one another—so much so that she had occasionally gone into the garage or the yard to ask them to bear in mind that there were at least some people in the vicinity who needed to concentrate on their work, and that was very difficult, was it not, if there were other people who insisted on shouting at the top of their voices about some matter of no interest to anybody else, namely, which girls were particularly friendly towards boys and which were not, or the prospects of the Zebras in the forthcoming football finals, or semi-finals, or whatever they were.