A morbid notion, and Mma Ramotswe was not given to such things, so as she lowered herself on to the bench, the gift parcel on her lap, she turned her mind to something else altogether: the Sheba case. Although she had not started her actual investigation, she had been thinking about it, and thinking about a problem – even in a rather dreamy way – was often a good way of allowing the mind to come up with possibilities. What puzzled her about this case was that if anybody was lying, it would be the aunt: she was the one on whose word the whole matter rested. If Mma Sheba was right and Liso was not the real Liso, then there had to be a reason for the aunt to go along with that deception. Would she have an interest in stopping the real Liso from inheriting the farm? Would it be because he might evict her from her house? That was possible. Or did she want this other young man to inherit it because she could control him in some way? Perhaps she wanted to buy the farm at a knockdown price and had a secret agreement with him to sell it to her if she lied about his identity in order to enable him to inherit. Unlikely, she thought. Very unlikely.

Her chain of thought was diverted when she looked up and saw two workmen struggling with several large plywood boards. The boards had been covering the window of a shop undergoing renovations, and now the renewed shop beneath was being revealed. She tried to envisage what had been there before. It had been, she seemed to recall, a shop that sold gardening equipment: spades and trowels, specialist rakes and gloves. These were things that people liked to own, and would find quite useful, but not things that they would bother to buy. If you wanted a trowel, you hunted through the piles of old possessions that naturally accumulated in sheds and garages and as likely as not you found one, soil-encrusted and ancient, but a trowel nonetheless; you did not think of buying such a thing.

She shook her head as she thought of the shop-owner’s disappointment at becoming yet another commercial failure. People had said that the same fate awaited her when she started the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. They had laughed and said that nobody would want the services of a detective agency in a society in which there were few secrets, and where, moreover, everybody prided themselves on how easily they could find out anything they wished to know. That is what they had said behind her back and in some cases even to her face. Yet here she was, years later, with a firm that had defied these Jeremiah-like predictions and was a well established, prosperous concern. Well, if not actually prosperous, then at least not a business that lost too much money.