The No. 2 Global Detective by Toby Clements Read Free Book Online

letters.’
    â€˜Letters?’
    â€˜In the post. From all over the world. Someone is trying to undermine us, Tom. Trying to catch us out, trying to show that the current crop of literary detectives are no good; unsettling them and destroying their confidence. There have been cases of them acting strangely: taking to drink, or giving it up. Someone is challenging us. This,’ he held up the spear, ‘is just another sign. It is a summons. One of us needs to get out to Botswana and find out what all this is about.’
    â€˜But—’ began Tom.
    The Dean held up a hand.
    â€˜Tom, even to so much as suggest there may be alternative courses of action, such as waiting for the police, even to suggest we may be wrong about this, is to lose the plot; lose the game; lose the audience; the reader. Surely you know that?’
    This was one of the Basic Rules of the Genre, something Tom had known in theory almost all his life. He had not realised how hard it was to rub up against it in real life.
    â€˜We have a contact in Botswana, of course. Delicious Ontoaste; class of ’74. You may have heard of her?’
    Of course Tom had heard of Delicious Ontoaste. She had been one of the College’s great successes of the last ten years. Despite having started with a minor academic publisher, she had become a word-of-mouth bestseller – the best kind of bestseller.
    â€˜And you want me to go, don’t you? Because of my father?’
    Wikipedia nodded sharply. Then he tossed the spear up in the air, its point missing Tom’s eye by an inch, caught it by the shaft and plunged it back into the wound in Claire’s chest with a glutinous squeal. The body gave a kind of a sigh and deflated.
    â€˜Always wanted to do that,’ he said and smiled.
    At that point they heard a voice at the door – a curious high-pitched squeak – and together all three whirled around. Alice Appleton. Tom’s first sight of her after ten years was just as she twisted at her knees and fainted to the floor in a heap.
    â€˜Oh dear,’ said the Dean.

Part II

The 11 O’Clock Moral Dilemma

CHAPTER ONE
    The Tiny White Aeroplane and the man in the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service both make an appearance.
    Mma Delicious Ontoaste, redoubtable founder of The Best Detective Agency in the World Ever! No. 2 , was sitting beneath a striped parasol outside the café at the Sir Seretse Kharma International Airport in Gaborone. On the table in front of her was a mug of foaming bush tea and the sky above her was of the colour it usually assumed at ten o’clock in the morning: clear, blue and cloudless. It was a good sky, Mma Ontoaste sometimes thought; the best sky in the world, stretching all the way to the horizon of the best country in the world, and she was the best woman in the world, sitting there, still with that mug of foaming bush tea, still thinking strange thoughts, except that today Mma Ontoaste was not thinking strange thoughts about the sky. Mma Ontoaste was thinking strange thoughts about the tiny white aeroplane and the Very Important Person on board whom she had come to the airport to meet.
    It had begun a few days before, when Mma Ontoaste had been sitting in her office on Merchistone Drive, sipping bush tea from her own mug, the one her dear late daddy – that good man – had passed on to her, and listening to her new assistant, Mma Murakami – that good woman – as she typed very quickly in the grass hut next door. Outside nothing except the air moved. It was one of those long hot African days, when there seemed to be no escape from the heat. The sun beat down on the grass roof of the hut and the cattle sought out the shade of the acacia tree. The red soil bounced the heat back up and it seemed as if between them the sun and the earth had declared war on anything cool and green and living.
    Behind the steady clatter of Mma Murakami’s typewriter, Mma Ontoaste could