LIFE AT Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors (and, indeed, at the No. 1

Ladies’ Detective Agency) was returning to normal. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had resumed his old practice of coming in to work shortly before seven in the morning, and would already be prostrate on his inspection board shining a torch up into a car’s underbelly by the time the two apprentices arrived at eight o’clock. Their contract of apprenticeship stipulated that they should work eight hours a day, with time off for study every three months, but Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had given up expecting them to comply with this. Certainly they arrived at eight and left at five, which made nine hours each day, but from this total there was deducted an hour for lunch, and two tea breaks of forty-five minutes each. It was the tea breaks that were the problem, but any attempt to insist on a far shorter break had been met with sullen resistance. Eventually he had given up; he was a generous man and did not like conflict.

“You may have it easy here,” he had warned them on more than one occasion, “but don’t think that all bosses are like this. When you finish your apprenticeship-if you finish-then you’ll have to find another job, a real job, and you’ll learn all about it then.”

“Learn about what, boss?” asked the older apprentice, smiling conspiratorially at his friend.

“About the working world,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “About what it’s like to be kept really hard at it.”

The older apprentice rolled his eyes in mock horror. “But you’ll keep us on here, won’t you, boss? You couldn’t do without us, could you?”

The arrival of Mma Makutsi as acting manager of the garage had brought about a change, even if the long tea breaks survived. She had quickly shown that she would take no nonsense from the two apprentices, and they had rapidly abandoned their slovenly ways. Mma Ramotswe had been unable to work out what lay behind the change, so dramatic was it; she had assumed that it was something to do with working for a woman, which may have encouraged them to show what they could do, but she had eventually thought that it was something deeper than that.