Mma Ramotswe had no idea. Trucks were Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s concern, not hers. She was not even sure she could identify the manufacturer of her tiny white van; there had been a name painted on the back at one stage, but over the years it had been obliterated by the wind and clouds of dust and the scratching of thorn bushes. Now there was nothing, just ridges in the metal where there had been letters. Not that it mattered, of course: the tiny white van was too old to remember its maker, too ancient to be taken back.

Missing names, missing persons—how remarkable it was, she thought, that we managed to anchor ourselves at all in this world, and that we did so by giving ourselves names and linking those names with places and other people. But there were people, she imagined, whose names said nothing about them and who had only the haziest idea of who they were, people who might never even have known their parents. Mma Ramotswe could not remember her mother, who died when she was a baby, but at least she had known her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, whose memory seemed undimmed by the passage of the years. She thought of him every day, every day, and believed that in due course—but not too soon, she hoped—she would see him again in that place that was Botswana but not Botswana, that place of gentle rain and contented cattle. And perhaps on that day those people who had nobody here would find that there were indeed people for them. Perhaps.

MMA RAMOTSWE ARRIVED in the office slightly before Mma Makutsi that morning. In the next-door premises of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, her husband, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, was already hard at work with his two apprentices. Or rather, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was hard at work; the apprentices gave the appearance of busying themselves with the servicing of a car but were more concerned with chatting about their activities of the previous evening. Charlie, the older of the two, and the ringleader, as Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni thought of him, had recently moved into a room in a shared house in Old Naledi and was regaling his younger colleague with tales of how suitable this room was for the entertaining of girlfriends.

“It’s a great place to take them,” he said. “It’s tops. A-one. They come in and see how nice it is and they say, ‘Wow! Is this where you live, Charlie?’” This last was uttered in a voice intended to sound like a girl’s, a high-pitched, silly voice going up at the end and culminating in a squeak.