Ladies' Detective Agency 01 - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

imagined the
father—the father of the dead boy, and for a brief moment she remembered
that awful afternoon in Mochudi, at the hospital, when the nurse had come up to
her, straightening her uniform, and she saw that the nurse was crying. To lose
a child, like that, was something that could end one’s world. One could
never get back to how it was before. The stars went out. The moon disappeared.
The birds became silent.
    “Why do you say he’s dead?”
she asked. “He could have got lost and then …”
    Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head. “No,” he said. “That boy
would have been taken for witchcraft. He’s dead now.”
    She
put her empty mug down on the table. Outside, in the workshop, a wheel brace
was dropped with a loud, clanging sound.
    She glanced at her friend.
This was a subject that one did not talk about. This was the one subject which
would bring fear to the most resolute heart. This was the great taboo.
    “How can you be sure?”
    Mr J.L.B. Matekoni smiled.
“Come on, now, Mma Ramotswe. You know as well as I do what goes on. We
don’t like to talk about it do we? It’s the thing we Africans are
most ashamed of. We know it happens but we pretend it doesn’t. We know
all right what happens to children who go missing. We know.”
    She
looked up at him. Of course he was telling the truth, because he was a
truthful, good man. And he was probably right—no matter how much
everybody would like to think of other, innocent explanations as to what had
happened to a missing boy, the most likely thing was exactly what Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni said. The boy had been taken by a witch doctor and killed for
medicine. Right there, in Botswana, in the late twentieth century, under that
proud flag, in the midst of all that made Botswana a modern country, this thing
had happened, this heart of darkness had thumped out like a drum. The little
boy had been killed because some powerful person somewhere had commissioned the
witch doctor to make strengthening medicine for him.
    She cast her eyes
down.
    “You may be right,” she said. “That poor boy
…”
    “Of course I’m right,” said Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni. “And why do you think that poor man had to write that letter to
you? It’s because the police will be doing nothing to find out how and
where it happened. Because they’re scared. Every one of them.
They’re just as scared as I am and those two boys out there under that
car are. Scared, Mma Ramotswe. Frightened for our lives. Every one of
us—maybe even you.”
     
    MMA RAMOTSWE
went to bed at ten that night, half an hour later than usual. She liked to lie
in bed sometimes, with her reading lamp on, and read a magazine. Now she was
tired, and the magazine kept slipping from her hands, defeating her struggles
to keep awake.
    She turned out the light and said her prayers,
whispering the words although there was nobody in the house to hear her. It was
always the same prayer, for the soul of her father, Obed, for Botswana and for
rain that would make the crops grow and the cattle fat, and for her little
baby, now safe in the arms of Jesus.
    In the early hours of the morning
she awoke in terror, her heartbeat irregular, her mouth dry. She sat up and
reached for the light switch, but when she turned it on nothing happened. She
pushed her sheet aside—there was no need for a blanket in the hot
weather—and slipped off the bed.
    The light in the corridor did
not work either, nor that in the kitchen, where the moon made shadows and
shapes on the floor. She looked out of the window, into the night. There were
no lights anywhere; a power cut.
    She opened the back door and stepped
out into the yard in her bare feet. The town was in darkness, the trees
obscure, indeterminate shapes, clumps of black.
    “Mma
Ramotswe!”
    She stood where she was, frozen in terror. There was
somebody in the yard, watching her. Somebody had whispered her name.
    She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came. And it would be dangerous
to speak,