To the Land of Long Lost Friends: No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (20) Read Online Free Page B

“Ow!”
    “He yelled and yelled,” Mma Ramotswe continued. “Poor little boy.”
    “If he had put the trousers up on a hook, then it would not have happened.”
    Mma Ramotswe nodded. “No, it would not.” She decided to change the subject. Hooks were useful, but there was a limit to what one could say about them. “That was a good wedding, I think, Mma. We enjoyed it.”
    “A very good wedding,” Mma Makutsi agreed. “Unfortunately, Phuti developed a headache and we didn’t stay all that long. It was being out in the sun, you see. He doesn’t like that very much and it gives him a headache sometimes. The sun makes the brain swell and then it presses on the skull, which cannot expand very much, if at all.”
    She looked at Mma Ramotswe while she continued to polish the lenses of her spectacles. “The skull is the same size all the time,” she said. “Once you’re fully grown, your head doesn’t get any bigger. Even if you become quite fat, Mma—even then. Your body gets bigger, but your head stays the same size.”
    “I think I know that, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You don’t hear many people say, ‘Oh, my head is getting so big, I must go on a diet.’ ”
    Mma Makutsi put on her spectacles. “That’s true. And there’s another thing I’ve thought about, Mma, and that is the relationship between the size of the head and intelligence. You’d think there’d be a connection, wouldn’t you?”
    Mma Ramotswe was doubtful. Any such connection would be far too obvious, she thought, and one thing she had learned in her profession was that that which is obvious frequently turns out to be false. Except sometimes, of course, as Clovis Andersen himself pointed out in The Principles of Private Detection . He advised his readers to look at the most likely possibilities first because a cunning malefactor might assume—incorrectly, it was to be hoped—that the obvious solution would be discounted in any search or enquiry. If I were a thief trying to conceal the things I had stolen, he wrote, I would put them behind a door marked “Storeroom for Stolen Items.” That would be the safest place, as everybody would think that was far too obvious. People would look everywhere but behind that door. It is all a question of psychology.
    Mma Makutsi recalled one of the instructors at the Botswana Secretarial College. “I remember one of my professors…,” she began.
    Mma Ramotswe raised an eyebrow. She had heard Mma Makutsi refer to her teachers as professors, but it was completely unjustified. Whatever the merits of the Botswana Secretarial College might be, it was still just that—a secretarial college. It was not a branch of the University of Botswana, as were places like the Botswana College of Agriculture. It did not award degrees, and its staff were definitely not professors.
    When she first heard mention of these so-called professors, she had felt inclined to stop Mma Makutsi and say, “But who are these professors, Mma? I didn’t know that the Botswana Secretarial College was part of the University of Botswana, where all the professors work. This is very interesting news, Mma.” She had not said this, though; kindness prevented her, as it always did. If Mma Makutsi wanted to promote her teachers in this way, then there was no real reason why she should not do so. It evidently gave her pleasure to think of her instructors in these terms, and it was a harmless enough promotion. The real professors, those erudite men and women at the University of Botswana who knew so much about such a wide range of subjects, might perhaps object if they heard of it, but even they would turn a blind eye, she imagined, to this innocent piece of wishful thinking.
    “This professor,” Mma Makutsi continued, “taught us book-keeping. He was not very tall—normal height, I think, for a man—but he was very well built. In fact, Mma, he was a bit round in shape, a bit like a pumpkin, you know.”
    Mma Ramotswe listened.