She got up and walked over to the battered filing cabinet that stood halfway between her desk and the desk occupied by Mma Makutsi. They would have to replace that cabinet, which had been acquired right at the beginning, when the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency was first set up. They had been in her first office then, that small breeze-block building in the shadow of Kgale Hill, where those insolent chickens had wandered in and pecked at the floor around one’s toes; such silly creatures, with their tattered combs and their scruffy leg feathers like tiny pantaloons. The filing cabinet had been virtually the first piece of office furniture then; there had not even been a proper desk for Mma Makutsi, who had been obliged to make do with a table that had been used for making tea on in the Water Affairs office but had been sold as surplus to requirements. They had entertained such high hopes, then, for their little agency, and had so quickly abandoned those hopes when no clients turned up for week after week. And the filing cabinet then was empty, quite empty, as they had received no letters from anybody and had no papers to file. Eventually, in desperation, Mma Makutsi had filed a tattered circular which somebody had slipped through the door. That circular, Mma Makutsi had told her the other day, was still there, as a reminder of how slow things had been and of how great things may come from moments of nothingness. Perhaps we should all do that, thought Mma Ramotswe. Perhaps we should all keep a few things, a few mementoes, to remind us of what we used to be, just in case we forgot. If I ever became really rich, she thought, rich enough to own a Mercedes-Benz, what would I keep of the tiny white van to remind me of what I used to drive? The steering wheel—perhaps inserted into the Mercedes-Benz by Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni in place of its grand new wheel, just to remind me? She smiled at the thought.

She pulled on the handle of the filing cabinet’s top drawer. It was stiff and would not budge. She pulled at it again, this time lifting it slightly; she remembered that this drawer was a difficult one and could get stuck. There was still no movement, and so she tried the drawer below, the one which Mma Makutsi had labelled Concluded Affairs. It was such a strange label for a filing drawer; as if the drawer contained the love letters, the keepsakes, of a crowded personal past. If she managed to get Concluded Affairs to open, then perhaps its upstairs neighbour, Current Investigations, might be more obliging.