"And?"

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sat down and stared at his hands.

"I was called to pull the car out of the ditch. I took my rescue truck and we winched it up. Then we towed it back here and left it round the back. I'll show it to you later."

He paused for a moment before continuing. The story seemed simple enough, but it appeared to be costing him a considerable effort to tell it.

"I looked it over. It was a panel-beating job and I could easily get my panel-beater to take it off to his workshop and sort it out. But there were one or two things I would have to do first. I had to check the electrics, for a start. These new expensive cars have so much wiring that a little knock here or there can make everything go wrong. You won't be able to lock your doors if the wires are nicked. Or your antitheft devices will freeze everything solid. It's very complicated, as those two boys out there drinking their tea on my time are only just finding out." "Anyway, I had to get at a fuse box under the dashboard, and while I was doing this, I inadvertently opened the glove compartment. I looked inside-I don't know why-but something made me do it. And I found something. A little bag."

Mma Ramotswe's mind was racing ahead. He had stumbled upon illicit diamonds-she was sure of it.

"Diamonds?"

"No," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "Worse than that."

SHE LOOKED at the small bag which he had taken out of his safe and placed on the table. It was made of animal skin-a pouch really-and was similar to the bags which the Basarwa ornamented with fragments of ostrich shell and used to store herbs and pastes for their arrows.

"I'll open it," he said. "I don't want to make you touch it."

She watched as he untied the strings that closed the mouth of the bag. His expression was one of distaste, as if he were handling something with an offensive smell.

And there was a smell, a dry, musty odour, as he extracted the three small objects from the bag. Now she understood. He need say nothing further. Now she understood why he had seemed so distracted and uncomfortable. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had found muti. He had found medicine.

She said nothing as the objects were laid out on the table. What could one say about these pitiful remnants, about the bone, about the piece of skin, about the little wooden bottle, stoppered, and its awful contents?

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, reluctant to touch the objects, poked at the bone with a pencil.

"See," he said simply. "That's what I found."

Mma Ramotswe got up from her chair and walked towards the door. She felt her stomach heave, as one does when confronted with a nauseous odour, a dead donkey in a ditch, the overpowering smell of carrion.

The feeling passed and she turned round.

"I'm going to take that bone and check," she said. "We could be wrong. It could be an animal. A duiker. A hare."

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head. "It won't be," he said. "I know what they'll say."

"Even so," said Mma Ramotswe. "Put it in an envelope and I'll take it."

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it. He was going to warn her, to tell her that it was dangerous to play around with these things, but that would imply that one believed in their power, and he did not. Did he?

She put the envelope in her pocket and smiled.

"Nothing can happen to me now," she said. "I'm protected."

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni tried to laugh at her joke, but found that he could not. It was tempting Providence to use those words and he hoped that she would not have cause to regret them.

"There's one thing I'd like to know," said Mma Ramotswe, as she left the office. "That car-who owned it?"

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni glanced at the two mechanics. They were both out of earshot, but he lowered his voice nonetheless while he told her.

"Charlie Gotso," he said. "Him. That one."

Mma Ramotswe's eyes widened.

"Gotso? The important one?"

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni nodded. Everyone knew Charlie Gotso. He was one of the most influential men in the country. He had the ear of… well, he had the ear of just about everyone who counted. There was no door in the country closed to him, nobody who would turn down a request for a favour. If Charlie Gotso asked you to do something for him, you did it. If you did not, then you might find that life became more difficult later on. It was always very subtly done-your application for a licence for your business may encounter unexpected delays; or you may find that there always seemed to be speed traps on your particular route to work; or your staff grew restless and went to work for somebody else. There was never anything you could put your finger on-that was not the way in Botswana, but the effect would be very real.

"Oh dear," said Mma Ramotswe.

"Exactly," said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. "Oh dear."

IN THE beginning, which in Gaborone really means thirty years ago, there were very few factories. In fact, when Princess Marina watched as the Union Jack was hauled down in the stadium on that windy night in 1966 and the Bechuanaland Protectorate ceased to exist, there were none. Mma Ramotswe had been an eight-year-old girl then, a pupil at the Government School at Mochudi, and only vaguely aware that anything special was happening and that something which people called freedom had arrived. But she had not felt any different the next day, and she wondered what this freedom meant. Now she knew of course, and her heart filled with pride when she thought of all they had achieved in thirty short years. The great swathe of territory which the British really had not known what to do with had prospered to become the best-run state in Africa, by far. Well could people shout Pula! Pula! Rain! Rain! with pride.

Gaborone had grown, changing out of all recognition. When she first went there as a little girl there had been little more than several rings of houses about the Mall and the few government offices-much bigger than Mochudi, of course, and so much more impressive, with the government buildings and Seretse Khama's house. But it was still quite small, really, if you had seen photographs of Johannesburg, or even Bulawayo. And no factories. None at all.

Then, little by little, things had changed. Somebody built a furniture workshop which produced sturdy living-room chairs. Then somebody else decided to set up a small factory to make breeze-blocks for building houses. Others followed, and soon there was a block of land on the Lobatse Road which people began to call the Industrial Sites. This caused a great stir of pride; so this is what freedom brought, people thought. There was the Legislative Assembly and the House of Chiefs, of course, where people could say what they liked-and did- but there were also these little factories and the jobs that went with them. Now there was even a truck factory on the Fran-cistown Road, assembling ten trucks a month to send up as far as the Congo; and all of this started from nothing!

Mma Ramotswe knew one or two factory managers, and one factory owner. The factory owner, a Motswana who had come into the country from South Africa to enjoy the freedom denied him on the other side, had set up his bolt works with a tiny amount of capital, a few scraps of secondhand machinery bought from a bankruptcy sale in Bulawayo, and a workforce consisting of his brother-in-law, himself, and a mentally handicapped boy whom he had found sitting under a tree and who had proved to be quite capable of sorting bolts. The business had prospered, largely because the idea behind it was so simple. All that the factory made was a single sort of bolt, of the sort which was needed for fixing galvanised tin roof sheeting onto roof beams. This was a simple process, which required only one sort of machine-a machine of a sort that never seemed to break down and rarely needed servicing.