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

hear a radio playing some jazz music. It was Mma Murakami’s radio, a leather-encased Roberts radio, with a wire clothes-hanger in place of the original aerial, which Mma Ontoaste assumed had been broken off in some accident or other in the past. Ordinarily jazz was the outward sign of deep inner corruption or incurable evil, of course and, had Mma Ontoaste known that her new assistant Mma Murakami not only had a radio, but that she also listened to jazz while she typed, then it is doubtful that Mma Ontoaste would have given Mma Murakami the job in the first place, even if she had, as she claimed, got 98 per cent in her final exam at the Napier Secretarial College.
    But lessons were there to be learned, were they not, and once her old assistant, Mma Pollosopresso, had revealed herself to be a bad woman, who would go so far as to blow up her employer’s tiny white van with explosives made from a half cup of sugar which she must have hoarded while she had been working at the Detective Agency and some fertiliser that she would have borrowed from the orphan farm, well then Mma Ontoaste had had no choice but to ask her to leave the Detective Agency and employ Mma Murakami in her place.
    And it was just as Mma Ontoaste was sitting on the chair on the veranda of the grass hut, sipping more bush tea, and looking out across the yard at the pumpkin patch and the melons and the other nameless shrubs that filled the space, thinking of how much she loved it all, that the man wearing the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service, a smart uniform, with blue shorts and a white shirt, had knocked at the gate of the stock fence and greeted her modestly.
    â€˜Mma.’
    â€˜Rra,’ she had said, getting to her feet to meet her visitor and to show him to a chair in the old Botswana custom. The man in the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service had looked puzzled for a second, but he had readily accepted her offer of bush tea and a slice of cake and this pleased Mma Ontoaste. So few people these days had time to stop and talk. Her beloved father, Pepe, was of the mind that anything that could not be solved over a cup of bush tea was probably not worth solving anyway. In this he was probably right, if you believed, as Mma Ontoaste did, that people were basically good, but, sadly, just a little bit thick. They needed to be told what to think and what to do and here they were in luck, because, apart from bush tea, thick slices of richly fruited cake and her husband, Mr JPS Spagatoni, that good man, as well as numerous friends and the cows that her father – that other good man – had left her in his will, Mma Ontoaste loved nothing more than telling people what to do.
    â€˜Now, Rra,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you?’
    â€˜Mma,’ he replied, using the respectful greeting that, along with his polite acceptance of her offer of the chair and the thick slice of cake and the bush tea, confirmed him to be a good man, ‘I have a telegram for you.’
    In one hand he held out a brown envelope with Mma Ontoaste’s name and address written upon it.
    â€˜Oh Rra, a telegram!’ Mma Ontoaste clapped her hands together. ‘I am so happy! You are so clever! However did you find me?’
    The man in the uniform of the Botswana Postal Service pointed to the name and the address written on the envelope in black ink. True it was not handwritten, but printed rather, which was a pity. Mma Ontoaste was not against progress or change, of course. Just look at Botswana. Had not that good country changed since that hot night all those years ago when the fireworks failed to ignite and which seemed to augur ill for Independence, etc etc?
    And yet change was not always a good thing, Mma Ontoaste sometimes thought, especially if it led to people becoming cold and selfish as they were in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Malawi and, of course, the Democratic Republic of Congo. She could have