She drove past the traffic circle at the university and then along the road towards the part of town known as the Village. Although she remembered it when it was a sleepy collection of meandering, tree-lined streets, it was less of a village now, since several large blocks of flats had been built on its periphery. Blocks of flats could change everything, thought Mma Ramotswe. They were designed for people, but people were not necessarily designed for them. These flats at the edges of the Village, though, were made more human by the washing that was hung out to dry from their balconies; by the children who congregated in their doorways, or played with skipping ropes and dogs on their pathways; by the music that the residents listened to, melodies that drifted out of the open windows and throbbed with life. All of this made it harder for large new buildings to deaden the human spirit. It was like the bush: you could clear it and build something where once there had been nothing but trees and grass and termite mounds, but if you turned your back for a moment, Africa would begin to reclaim what had always been hers. The grass would encroach, its seeds carried by the wind; birds would drop the seeds of saplings that would then send tiny shoots up out of the ground; the termites would marshal their exploratory troops to begin rebuilding their own intricate cities of mud in the very places they had claimed once before. And sooner or later the bush would have covered all your efforts and it would be as it was before, the wound on nature completely healed.

By the time she reached the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had already arrived for work at his garage, Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, with whom the agency shared premises. He was talking to a client who had brought in a car for repair – one of his regular clients, Mma Ramotswe noticed; one of that unfortunate category of people whose cars always seemed to be breaking down but who could not bring themselves to part with them and buy a new model. Mma Ramotswe understood that attitude only too well; she loved her van and had resisted every effort on the part of Mr J. L. B. Matekoni to trade it in for something newer. And when he had eventually succeeded, she had pined for her late van until it had been recovered, restored and given back into her ownership, where it was surely destined to be.