“I went down to my farm with my wife and my two sons. They are strong boys-one is this high and one is this high.” He gestured with the palm of his hand held upwards; it was never a good idea to show the height of a person with the palm facing downwards, as this could push the spirit down. “We were going to stay there for a week, but something happened on the second night which changed that. Some men came to the farm from over the border. They came at night, riding on their horses. They were ostrich rustlers.”

Mma Ramotswe stopped and looked at Mr. Molefelo in astonishment.

“There are ostrich rustlers? They steal your ostriches?”

Mr. Molefelo nodded. “They are very dangerous men. They come in bands with their guns, and they chase the ostriches back over the border into Namibia. The Namibians say that they are trying to catch them, but there are never enough policemen. Never. They say they will look for them, but how do you find men like that who live out in the bush, in camps? They are like ghosts. They come and go at night, and you will find a ghost more easily than you will find those men. They are men who have no names, no family, nothing. They are like leopards.

“I was sleeping in the house when they came. I am not a heavy sleeper, and I heard a noise down in the ostrich paddocks. So I got out of bed to see whether there was some creature coming to eat the ostriches-a lion, perhaps, or a hyena. I took a big torch and my rifle, and I walked down the path that led from the house to the paddocks. I did not need to switch on the torch, as there was a very large moon, which made shadows on the ground.

“I had almost reached the paddock when I was suddenly knocked to the ground. I dropped my rifle and my torch, and my face was in the dirt. I remember breathing the dust and coughing, and then I was kicked in the side, painfully, and a man pulled my head up and looked at me. He had a rifle in his hand-not my rifle-and he put the barrel at my head and said something to me. I did not understand him, as he was not speaking in Setswana. It may have been Hereto or one of the languages they speak over there. It could even have been Afrikaans, which quite a lot of them use down there, not just the Boers.

“I thought I was going to die, and so I thought of my sons. I wondered what would happen to them when they no longer had a father. Then I thought of my own father, for some reason, and I remembered walking with him through the bush, just as we are doing now, Mma, and talking to him about cattle. I thought that I would like to do that with my own sons, but I had been too busy, and now it was too late. These were strange thoughts. I was not thinking of myself but of other people.”

Mma Ramotswe stooped down to pick up an interesting-looking stick. “I can understand that,” she said, examining the stick, “I’m sure that I would think the same.”

But would she? She had never been in that position; she had never been in danger at all, really, and she had no idea what would go through her mind. She would like to imagine that she would think of her father, Obed Ramotswe, the Daddy, that great man; but perhaps if matters came to such a pass, the mind would do the wrong thing and start thinking about mundane issues, like the electricity bill. It would be sad to leave this life on such a note, worrying about whether the Botswana Electricity Corporation had been paid. The Botswana Electricity Corporation would never think about her, she was sure.

“This man was very rough. He pulled my head back. Then he made me sit up, with the gun still pointing at my head, while he called out to one of his friends. They came out of the shadows, on their horses, and they stood about me, with the horses breathing against me. They talked among themselves, and I realised that they were discussing whether or not to shoot me. I am sure that they were talking about this, although I could not understand their language.

“Then I saw a light and heard somebody in the distance call out in Setswana. It was one of my men, who must now have woken up and had shouted out to the others. This made the man who was holding me hit me on the side of the head with his rifle. Then he stood up and ran over to a tree where he had tied his horse. There was more shouting from my men, and I heard them start the engine of the truck. One of the men who had surrounded me shouted out something to the others, and they rode off. I was left alone, feeling the blood run down the side of my face. I still have a scar, which you can see, look, just here between my cheek and my ear. That is my reminder of what happened.”

“You were a lucky man to have escaped,” said Mma Ramotswe. “They could easily have shot you. If you weren’t here talking to me, I would have thought the story ended quite differently.”

Mr. Molefelo smiled. “I thought that, too. But it did not. And I was able to go back to see my wife and my sons, who started to cry when they saw their father with blood streaming down his face. And I was crying, too, I think, and shaking all over like a dog who’s been thrown in the water. And I was like this for more than a day, I think. I was very ashamed. A man should not behave like that. But I was like a frightened little boy.

“We went back to Lobatse so that I could see one of the doctors there who knew how to stitch up faces. He gave me injections and drew the wound together. Then I went back to work and tried to forget about what had happened. But I could not, Mma. I kept thinking about what this meant for my life. I know that this may sound strange to you, but it made me think about everything I had done. It made me weigh up my life. And it made me want to tie things up, so that next time-and I hope there will not be a next time-the next time I faced death like that, I could think: I have set my life in order.”

“That is a very good idea,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We should all do that, I think. But we never do. For example, my electricity bill-”

“Those are small things,” Mr. Molefelo interjected. “Bills and debts are nothing, really. What really counts are the things that you have done to people. That is what counts. And that is why I’ve come to see you, Mma. I want to confess. I do not go to the Catholic Church, where you can sit in a box and tell the priest all about the things you have done. I cannot do that. But I want to talk to somebody, and that is why I have come to see you.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. She understood. Shortly after opening the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, she had discovered that part of her role would be to listen to people and to help them unburden themselves of their past. And indeed her subsequent reading of Clovis Andersen had confirmed this. Be gentle, he had written. Many of the people who will come to see you are injured in spirit. They need to talk about things that have hurt them, or about things that they have done. Do not sit in judgement on them, but listen. Just listen.

They had reached a place where the path dipped down into a dried-up watercourse. There was a termite mound to one side of it, and on the other, a small expanse of rock rising out of the red earth. There was the chewed-up pith of sugarcane lying to the side of the path and a fragment of broken blue glass, which caught the sun. Not far away a goat was standing on its hind legs, nibbling at the less accessible leaves of a shrub. It was a good place to sit and listen, under a sky that had seen so much and heard so much that one more wicked deed would surely make no difference. Sins, thought Mma Ramotswe, are darker and more powerful when contemplated within confining walls. Out in the open, under such a sky as this, misdeeds were reduced to their natural proportions-small, mean things that could be faced quite openly, sorted, and folded away.