It was a possibility, she felt, but only a remote one, and it did not really bring her any closer to a solution. The problem with being a private detective was that people expected you to provide them with a clear-cut answer to their query. Sometimes that could be done, and Mma Ramotswe was able to provide a full account of exactly what happened, but there were many occasions on which that simply was not possible and a more tentative answer was all that could be given – or no answer at all. Some matters remained obstinately unresolved because that was what life was like. Not all the uncertainties we faced were capable of being resolved – there were many strings left untied; there were many events that happened and could not be explained; there were many injustices that remained injustices because we could not find out who had perpetrated them, or who could rectify them. As a child she had believed that wrongs would always be righted, that somehow the world would not let the innocent suffer, but now she realised that this was not true. Old oppressors were replaced by new ones, from another distant place or from right next door. Old lies were replaced by new ones, backed up by old threats. There had been so much suffering in Africa, and nobody had done a great deal to stop it. In some places the suffering continued: through wars fought by child soldiers, crying behind their guns; through famine and disease, quick to take root in the shanty towns that perched on the edge of plenty. People waited for intervention, for rescue, but it never came – or only rarely, and then too late. Contemplating this vast human suffering, you might be tempted to shrug your shoulders, but you could not. You had to try, thought Mma Ramotswe – you had to try to sort things out for others and point them in the direction of the truth that they were so anxious to find.

Now that she had resolved to talk to Mma Makutsi about the Molapos, the decision seemed to relieve her of the anxiety that had been building up around the case. And there were other everyday things to occupy her time and her mind, including the shopping. Men might believe that food appeared miraculously in the kitchen, but women, Mma Ramotswe included, knew better than that. They could hardly forget that there was a lot of trudging around shops to be done, and the choosing of this item rather than that one, which sometimes involved squeezing things to determine ripeness, or sniffing them to gauge freshness. This, she had noticed, was not something that men tended to do; they did not squeeze things in shops.