Mma Ramotswe looked at the man standing before her and watched him take a sip of his freshly poured tea. There was something vulnerable about Mr. Polopetsi that always made her feel slightly sorry for him. But she liked him, and indeed had liked him from the time when they had first met in those inauspicious circumstances almost two years previously. Mma Ramotswe had inadvertently knocked him off his bicycle when she was driving to Tlokweng in her tiny white van. She had picked him up, driven him home, and arranged for the repair of the buckled bicycle wheel. After that, she had persuaded Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni to take him on as an assistant in the garage—a role in which he had quickly showed his worth. Since then, if there was not enough work for him in the garage, he had helped in the agency, not on major cases—if any of their cases could be called major, which was doubtful—but on small inquiries, particularly on those which required a man rather than a woman. Mma Ramotswe could not go into a bar, for example, without attracting attention, whereas a slight man like Mr. Polopetsi could slip into a bar virtually unnoticed.

“The lady without a mother is a new client,” she explained. “Her name is Mma Sebina. She is an orphan.”

“We are all orphans,” said Mr. Polopetsi. “I am an orphan. And you too, Mma Ramotswe, you are an orphan.”

Mma Ramotswe smiled. “Yes, I suppose we are. But it is different for us. We know who our late parents were. This lady is not sure who they were, and that is what she wants me to find out.”

Mr. Polopetsi blew across the rim of his mug to cool the tea. A small wisp of steam was caught in a beam of sunlight from the window, then vanished. “I suppose that is something we all want to know,” he said reflectively. “Have you noticed how people seem very interested in these family things when they get older? Sixty is when it starts. That is when they really want to know who were their parents’ parents and the parents of those ones before them. Right, right back to Chief Sechele’s days.” He paused, sipping at his tea. Mma Ramotswe noticed how he puckered his lips when he sipped; like a bushbuck drinking from the water, she thought. But perhaps we were all like some animal or another, not just Mr. Polopetsi, who looked so much like one of those timid creatures one saw in the bush at the side of the road, ready to dart off into the undergrowth. And of course she had run him down, just as people sometimes ran small antelope down on the bush roads.