Mma Ramotswe folded the letter up carefully and tucked it into her pocket. “You said he, Rra. Why did you say he? Why do you think this letter is from a man?”

Again he hesitated before replying. “Because the writers of such letters are usually men,” he said. “It is the sort of letter that a stupid man writes.”

She looked ahead and engaged the van’s gears slowly, tentatively, as if she was pondering something. “You didn’t know what was in it, did you, Rra?” she asked, looking at him as she spoke. The tiny white van strayed from its path, towards the middle of the road.

“Of course not, Mma,” said Mr. Polopetsi. “I would not read a letter addressed to Mma Ramotswe.”

Or write one? she asked herself.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER SEVEN

LOOK, THE HEART IS BLEEDING

DURING MMA RAMOTSWE’S ABSENCE with Mr. Polopetsi, Mma Makutsi had spent her time tidying the office. It was a task that she always enjoyed, as she prided herself on being a ruthless disposer of unnecessary things. That was something that she had learned at the Botswana Secretarial College, where it had been stressed time and time again—almost to the point of becoming a mantra—A tidy office is an efficient office. And they had been given examples of real-life cases where untidiness in an office had led to disaster. One of these was that of a firm of quantity surveyors who had lost the contract for the construction of a large dam when the carefully prepared tender documents had gone missing in their notoriously untidy office. There had not been time to prepare another set before the deadline and the contract had gone to a rival. “Later on,” said the lecturer, “the documents were found under the chair of the head secretary. She had been sitting on them.”

That had brought laughter, even from Violet Sephotho, the undisputed ringleader of the glamorous girls in Mma Makutsi’s year; she, who normally heard very little of what was going on, so busy was she with the painting of her nails in the back row. She it was who had walked into a well-paid job with her miserable fifty-one per cent or whatever it was, while Mma Makutsi, with her distinguished record, had been turned down, sometimes with not so much as an interview.