She had no real idea what she would find when she went to see Daisy Manchwe, but she felt the likelihood was she would find that Daisy had done nothing to justify her husband’s departure and would, indeed, be nurturing antagonism towards Mma Soleti. One could never really understand other people’s marriages. Mma Ramotswe was as well aware of that as anybody – perhaps even more so, given that her work often required her to investigate the conjugal arrangements of others. A marriage, she had learned, is seldom what it seems to be on the surface; what appears to be the most equable, well settled of arrangements might be a seething mass of discontent and resentment underneath. And conversely, chaotic and noisy relationships, littered with conflict and infidelity, might prove to be the most durable of unions. There was simply no telling, she felt, and you had to be prepared to find anything.

This did not mean, though, that she thought Mma Soleti was wrong about the enmity of Mma Manchwe. You could be mistaken about many things in this life, thought Mma Ramotswe, but one thing that you were very rarely wrong about was whether somebody disliked you – that you could always tell. If Mma Soleti thought that Daisy Manchwe nursed an undying hatred towards her for stealing her husband, then she was probably right. She would have seen the daggers in the other woman’s eyes; daggers in the eyes were always visible, sometimes even through sunglasses.

It was not difficult to locate Daisy Manchwe’s details in the Gaborone Trade Directory. This was a publication heavily relied upon by Mma Makutsi, who believed that most tasks of identification could be completed by the simple expedient of looking through the telephone book or any of the other public directories she kept in the top drawer of her desk.

‘It’s all there,’ she said to Mma Ramotswe. ‘You just have to know where to look – which I do, Mma. I know my way around these things.’

The trade directory revealed that there were three photocopying businesses in the town. Daisy Manchwe’s, known as Clear Image Copies, was located in the new cluster of shops that had been set up near Kgale Hill. It was not a place that Mma Ramotswe liked to go, as she was loyal to the older and more sedate Riverwalk shopping centre. She also liked small, local shops; places where you were able to buy pins and candles and tins of syrup – the sort of real things that you needed, rather than the insubstantial clothes and flashy electrical goods that newer, louder shops sold.