The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

Andersen’s
The Principles of Private Detection,
of course, and he wondered whether Mma Ramotswe’s trusted
vade mecum
would give any instruction on what to do in circumstances like this. Presumably he would point out that you must at least have a description of the person you are interested in at the outset, which of course he had not obtained.
    Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni made a snap decision. He would follow the first car as it came out. There were no grounds for thinking that this was Mr. Botumile, but he had to choose, and he might as well…Or should he go for the second? There was something about the second which
looked
suspicious. The driver of the first car was obviously acting confidently and decisively in leaving first. That showed a clear conscience, whereas the second driver, contemplating the dissemblance and the tryst that lay ahead, showed the hesitation of one with a guilty conscience. It was a slender straw of surmise, but one which Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni grasped at in the absence of anything better. That would impress Clovis Andersen—and Mma Ramotswe—he thought: a decision based on a sound understanding of human psychology—and from a garage mechanic too!
    The snap decision, so confident and decisive, was reversed, and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni waited while the first of the two red cars swung out into the main road and drove off. At five o’clock on this road there was a fair bit of traffic to contend with, as people, anxious to return home, drove off to Gaborone West and onto the Lobatse Road, and to other places they lived; all of them going about their legitimate business, of course, unlike the second driver, who seemed to be hesitating. He had started his engine—a mechanic could tell that at a glance, even from that distance—but he was not moving for some reason. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni wondered why he should be waiting, and decided that this was a yet further indication of guilt: he was waiting until the driver of the other red car was well on his way, as he did not want that first driver to see him, the second driver, setting off in the wrong direction. That was clearly what was happening. Again, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was astonished at the way in which these conclusions came to mind. It seemed to him that once one started to think about a problem like this, everything all fitted into place surprisingly neatly, like one of those puzzles one saw in the papers where all the numbers added up or the missing letters made sense. He had not tried his hand at those, but perhaps he should. He had read somewhere that if you used your mind like that, then you kept it in good order for a longer period of time, and you put off the day when you would be sitting in the sun, like some of the very old people, not exactly sure which day of the week it was and wondering why the world no longer made the sense that it once did. Yet such people were often happy, he reminded himself, possibly because it did not really matter what day of the week it was anyway. And if they remembered nothing of the recent past but still held on to memories of twenty years ago, then that too might not be as bad as people might think. For many of us, thought Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, twenty years ago was a rather nice time. The world slipped away from us as we got older—of course it did—but perhaps we should not hold on too tightly.
    The red car ahead of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni went up Kudumatse Drive and continued on the road that led out to Kanye. The buildings became smaller—offices and small warehouses became houses; dirt roads went off on both sides to newly built dwellings, two-bedroomed embodiments of somebody’s ambitions, dreams, hard work, carved out of what had not all that long ago been thorn bush, grazing for cattle. He saw a car he thought he recognised, parked outside one of these; a car that he had worked on only a few weeks ago. It belonged to a teacher at Gaborone Secondary School, a man who everybody