She nodded a greeting to the client, whom she knew slightly, before making her way into the office. Mma Makutsi was sometimes in before her. Good time-keeping, she had often pointed out, was one of the lessons learned in the Botswana Secretarial College – at least by those who were willing to learn, and that did not include people like Violet Sephotho, who learned nothing except, perhaps, how to distract men. This morning, though, it was Mma Ramotswe who opened up the office, pulling up the blind on the main window, filling the kettle, and brushing the ants off the top of the filing cabinet. The presence of the ants on the cabinet was a mystery; they were there every morning, a long line of pinheaded creatures, marching obediently across the painted metal wastes on some quite unfathomable mission. Mma Makutsi had suggested that the ants were there before the filing cabinet or the building itself; that this was some ancient ant highway that they still felt compelled to follow. She had been opposed to ant powder, as had Mma Ramotswe. These insects did not bite, nor did they have that curious unpleasant smell that the larger Matabele ants had – and they had none of the aggressive instincts of those warriors. Every child had been bitten at one time or another by a Matabele ant and, remembering the pain, learned to leave a wide berth when those determined black ants were on the march.

She filled the kettle and prepared her first cup of tea. It was, in fact, her third of the day, but she did not count the two that she had at home before she reached the office; those cups were merely preparatory and therefore exempt from tally. Her cup of tea in her hand, she stood by the window looking out at the acacia tree behind the office. She had not given much thought to yesterday’s conversation with Mma Sheba, but now she wondered whether there was much that she could do. It seemed to her to be very odd that Mma Sheba should doubt the word of Rra Edgar’s sister. She was, after all, the boy’s aunt and if she said that Liso was the same boy who had been coming to stay on the farm every school holiday since he was very young, then that should be the end of the matter. Surely it would be easy enough to talk to the people who worked on the farm, or to the neighbours, and ask them whether Liso was the same boy. And if they said yes, which they no doubt would, then that would be the end of it. Why, she wondered, could Mma Sheba not have done that herself? And what interest, for that matter, would the aunt have in telling lies?