For a few moments Violet said nothing. Then she laughed. “Oh, I see how you thought that. There’s a simple explanation, you know—even if it will be a bit hard for some of you to get into her head.” At this, she looked at Mma Makutsi, before continuing, “You see, I thought you were somebody else altogether. I thought that you were somebody who…well, I owe a bit of money to. I’m going to pay them back next month, but I didn’t want them to make a scene here, in public. So I decided to get away from them. Simple, you see.”

Mma Ramotswe studied Violet as she spoke. It was hard to judge, she thought. Most liars were transparent, but the really hardened ones, the ones who were cold inside, who felt nothing, could lie very convincingly precisely because they felt no guilt. Everything that she had heard about Violet suggested that she was a person of that sort, and so all this might be lies—or it could be truth; she simply could not tell. And yet there still were questions she could ask.

“Tell me, Mma,” she asked gently, “why did you think that we were those other people? Do we look like them? Is one of them a traditionally built person? And one a young man like this one here? Or one like Mma Makutsi?”

Violet frowned, as if trying to make sense of the question. Then her answer came. “I cannot see very well in the distance at the moment,” she said. “I have lost my glasses, you see.”

The look that Mma Makutsi exchanged with Mma Ramotswe was so obvious, so triumphant, that even Violet noticed it.

“So?” said Violet. “So what’s so odd about that?”

“Blue frames?” asked Mma Makutsi, leaning forward towards Violet as she spoke. “Small glasses with blue frames?”

“No, not those ones,” said Violet. “I have those with me here, not that it’s any of your business, Grace Makutsi. My other glasses. The ones I use for long distance.”

And with that, she took a small pair of blue glasses out of the pocket of her dress, polished them ostentatiously, and then put them away.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THERE ARE MANY MIRACLES

IT WAS HER,” said Mma Makutsi as she filled Mma Ramotswe’s cup with tea and placed it on her desk, with rather more force, perhaps, than normally. “Of course it was her! Charlie was sure it was the same woman who had dropped off the letter. You heard him, Mma.”

Mma Ramotswe lifted the cup to her lips and looked down into the dark, red-brown liquid. It seemed troubled; when Mma Makutsi made tea in a bad mood, the tea reflected this. She sighed. She did not like to quote Clovis Andersen too often, but this, surely, was an occasion when the words of The Principles of Private Detection were particularly apposite.