“Of course, Charlie,” said Mma Ramotswe soothingly. “You finish your apprenticeship in your own time. It does not matter. Some people never even do an apprenticeship.”

She had not intended this to be a jibe, but Charlie seized on it immediately. Spinning round, he pointed triumphantly at Mma Makutsi. “Some detectives, for example, Mma! Some people who call themselves assistant detectives never did a detective apprenticeship in their lives! Ha!”

“Hush, Charlie,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We do not want to have an argument in here. This office is a peaceful place. This is Botswana, remember.”

“She…”

Mma Ramotswe cut him short. “Now, look, Charlie, we have a very important job for you. This is something that requires a very good actor. Somebody who could be in films…”

“If he finished his apprenticeship,” chipped in Mma Makutsi.

Mma Ramotswe threw a discouraging glance at her assistant. “Please! Please! Thank you! Now what we want you to do, Charlie, is to come with us-with Mma Makutsi and me. We are going to the Double Comfort Furniture Shop-you know, that's the place that belongs to Mr. Phuti Radiphuti.”

“Old Phuti,” said Charlie.

“And once we get there,” Mma Ramotswe persisted, “we would like you to go in and pretend that you are interested in buying a bed. Go to the bed department and you will find a lady there called Violet…”

“Violet Sephotho!” exclaimed Charlie. “The one we chased in the supermarket. The one with the bottom like that.” He made an expansive gesture.

Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “You should not talk like that, Charlie. But yes, she is a very glamorous lady.”

“Oh, is that what husband-stealers are called these days?” interjected Mma Makutsi. “That is a very good name for such a lady, I think.”

Mma Ramotswe allowed this to pass. “Yes, she is a glamorous lady, Charlie. And all I want you to do is to pretend that you are very interested in buying a bed. Say that you have just moved here from Francistown. Say that you had a very good job there with one of the mining companies, and now you are going to be based in Gaborone and need a new bed. Tell her that you would like a double bed-that you are not married or anything like that, but that you would like a good-sized bed. That is all you have to say.”

Charlie clapped his hands together enthusiastically. “I am a very good actor, Mma. This will be no problem.”

“I'm sure you're a good actor, Charlie. I'm sure you'll do it very well. But one thing: Could you pretend that you're not too sure about the bed she tries to sell you? Say that you will have to think about it and that you may need to look at beds in some other shops. Pretend to be one of those customers who always need persuading.”

“And then?”

“And then, after you have said all this, and she has said all that she says, you can say that you have to go, but that you will be back later. Don't sign anything, whatever you do.”

“I never sign things, Mma,” said Charlie. “If you give people your name, then they get you. I have always known that. Watch out is my motto!”

Mma Makutsi thought this very amusing. “Good one, Charlie. Watch out, here comes Charlie. Good motto, Charlie.”

Mma Ramotswe allowed herself a small smile at this, as did Charlie. This banter between Mma Makutsi and Charlie was not all that serious, she thought. In fact, she believed that underneath it all they probably liked each other, difficult though it was at times to see this affection in action. People have strange dealings with one another, Mma Ramotswe felt: those who appear on the surface to be friends may in reality be enemies-but how could you tell? And did it happen the other way round? Take Mr. Molofololo: he had many enemies, it seemed, or at least many people who appeared not to like him for some reason or other. But how many of these enemies were really friends? It was easy to imagine why an enemy might wish to appear a friend, but why, she wondered, would a friend claim to be an enemy?

Mma Makutsi now raised an objection. “One thing about this plan, Mma: What if she recognises Charlie from that time in the supermarket?”

Mma Ramotswe had thought of that and discounted the possibility. The encounter in the supermarket had been fraught, but it had mainly involved her and Mma Makutsi. Charlie had been in the background and had said nothing, which meant that in the heat of the altercation Violet probably barely noticed him.

“She won't recognise him,” she said. “And, anyway, even if she does, it won't matter. Even young men who work in garages need beds, don't they?”

“We all need a bed,” mused Mma Makutsi. “Everybody needs a bed.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. “That is certainly well known,” she said.

Mma Makutsi looked thoughtful. “One other thing, Mma. Why are you asking Charlie to do this? What do you hope to prove?”

“We'll see,” Mma Ramotswe replied. “Sometimes you don't know what you're looking for until you find it. Would you not agree, Mma?”

“I'm not sure, Mma. I would have to think about it.”

“Well, it's true,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It really is.”

THEY PARKED THE BLUE VAN outside the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, and while Charlie made his way inside, Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi sat in the cab of the van, the windows down for the heat. Fortunately, they had found some shade under one of those handy acacia trees that in the hot weather were to cars like honeycombs to bees. This one already had several vehicles nudged under its shade, but there was just enough room for the blue van.

After ten minutes, Mma Makutsi began to get anxious. “What is he doing in there, Mma? Do you think that he'll be trying out all sorts of chairs and things? Phuti says that some people come in just to sit in his comfortable chairs. He says that they often have no intention of buying anything. Sometimes he finds people asleep in the big armchairs and he has to wake them up.”

In bringing up the subject of chairs, she reminded herself of Phuti's promise to give her a new one for the office. She had not raised the matter again, and now was unsure what to do about it. The problem was that she felt that she could not have a new chair while her boss, Mma Ramotswe, still had an old one. And yet if she declined Phuti's offer, then he would surely be offended… It was all very difficult.

Mma Ramotswe, meanwhile, had been envisaging Phuti's customers sitting in those comfortable armchairs. “We all need to sit down,” she said.

“Yes, but not in chairs that don't belong to us,” countered Mma Makutsi. “That's the trouble with this country, Mma-there are too many people sitting down in other people's chairs.”

It was another of Mma Makutsi's odd statements-utterly unfounded in fact, Mma Ramotswe suspected, but not a point that she wished to argue. As far as she was concerned, if a chair was empty, then anybody should be welcome to sit in it. We should share our chairs, she felt. Maybe that was the real problem with the modern world-not enough of us were prepared to share our chairs. Yes, that was probably true, and she wondered whether she might not have a word with Bishop Mwamba and suggest that he talk about that in a future sermon. He could start off, perhaps, by asking the members of the congregation whether they had noticed how many chairs there were and how many of them were empty. That would get them thinking. But where would it go from there? That would be up to Bishop Mwamba, she decided: he was good at sermons, and he would surely find some way of deriving an important lesson from chairs.

This line of thought led to Professor Tlou. Mma Ramotswe was a great admirer of Professor Tlou, and she had read somewhere a reference to the fact that he had a chair of history. She knew that this was just a way of talking-that it simply meant that he was a professor of the history of Botswana-but she thought that it would be rather nice if the university were to give him an actual chair to go with the title. The chair of history, she felt, would have to be a very old chair, one of those chairs made out of dark hardwood with carved legs and an elaborate criss-cross seat of tightened animal-hide strips. It would be a very venerable chair, that chair, and quite unlike a chair of music, which would issue little musical squeaks when you sat in it, or which would make a sweet singing sound if it were left outside and the wind blew through it.