“Everything seemed to be going well, but after Dr Komoti had been there about three weeks the consultant in charge had a word with me. He said that he thought that the new doctor was a bit rusty and that some of the things he did seemed a bit surprising. For example, he had sewed several wounds up quite badly and the stitching had to be redone.
“But sometimes he was really quite good. For example, a couple of weeks ago we had a woman coming in with a tension pneumothorax. That’s a pretty serious matter. Air gets into the space round the lungs and makes the lung collapse, like a popped balloon. If this happens, you have to drain the air out as quickly as you can so that the lung can expand again.
“This is quite a tricky job for an inexperienced doctor. You’ve got to know where to put in the drain. If you get it wrong you could even puncture the heart or do all sorts of other damage. If you don’t do it quickly, the patient can die. I almost lost somebody myself with one of these a few years ago. I got quite a fright over it.
“Dr Komoti turned out to be pretty good at this, and he undoubtedly saved this woman’s life. The consultant turned up towards the end of the procedure and he let him finish it. He was impressed, and mentioned it to me. But at the same time, this is the same doctor who had failed to spot an obvious case of enlarged spleen the day before.”
“He’s inconsistent?” said Mma Ramotswe.
“Exactly,” said Dr Maketsi. “One day he’ll be fine, but the next day he’ll come close to killing some unfortunate patient.”
Mma Ramotswe thought for a moment, remembering a news item in The Star. “I was reading the other day about a bogus surgeon in Johannesburg,” she said. “He practised for almost ten years and nobody knew that he had no qualifications. Then somebody spotted something by chance and they exposed him.”
“It’s extraordinary,” said Dr Maketsi. “These cases crop up from time to time. And these people often get away with it for a long time—for years sometimes.”
“Did you check up on his qualifications?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “It’s easy enough to forge documents these days with photocopiers and laser printers—anybody can do it. Maybe he’s not a doctor at all. He could have been a hospital porter or something like that.”
Dr Maketsi shook his head. “We went through all that,” he said. “We checked with his Medical School in Nigeria—that was a battle, I can tell you—and we also checked with the General Medical Council in Britain, where he did a registrar’s job for two years. We even obtained a photograph from Nairobi, and it’s the same man. So I’m pretty sure that he’s exactly who he says he is.”
“Couldn’t you just test him?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “Couldn’t you try to find out how much he knows about medicine by just asking him some tricky questions?”
Dr Maketsi smiled. “I’ve done that already. I’ve taken the opportunity to speak to him about one or two difficult cases. On the first occasion he coped quite well, and he gave a fairly good answer. He clearly knew what he was talking about. But on the second occasion, he seemed evasive. He said that he wanted to think about it. This annoyed me, and so I mentioned something about the case we had discussed before. This took him off his guard, and he just mumbled something inconsequential. It was as if he had forgotten what he’d said to me three days before.”
Mma Ramotswe looked up at the ceiling. She knew about forgetfulness. Her poor Daddy had become forgetful at the end and had sometimes barely remembered her. That was understandable in the old, but not in a young doctor. Unless he was ill, of course, and in that case something could have gone wrong with his memory.
“There’s nothing wrong with him mentally,” said Dr Maketsi, as if predicting her question. “As far as I can tell, that is. This isn’t a case of pre-senile dementia or anything like that. What I’m afraid of is drugs. I think that he’s possibly abusing drugs and that half the time he’s treating patients he’s not exactly there.”
Dr Maketsi paused. He had delivered his bombshell, and he sat back, as if silenced by the implications of what he had said. This was almost as bad as if they had been allowing an unqualified doctor to practise. If the Minister heard that a doctor was treating patients in the hospital while high on drugs, he might begin to question the closeness of supervision in the hospital.
He imagined the interview. “Now Dr Maketsi, could you not see from the way this man was behaving that he was drugged? Surely you people should be able to spot things like that. If it’s obvious enough to me when I walk down the street that somebody has been smoking dagga, then surely it should be obvious enough to somebody like you. Or am I fondly imagining that you people are more perceptive than you really are …”
“I can see why you’re worried,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But I’m not sure whether I can help. I don’t really know my way around the drug scene. That’s really a police matter.”
Dr Maketsi was dismissive. “Don’t talk to me about the police,” he said. “They never keep their mouths shut. If I went to them to get this looked into, they’d treat it as a straightforward drugs enquiry. They’d barge in and search his house and then somebody would talk about it. In no time at all word would be all about town that he was a drug addict.” He paused, concerned that Mma Ramotswe should understand the subtleties of his dilemma. “And what if he isn’t? What if I’m wrong? Then I would have as good as killed his reputation for no reason. He may be incompetent from time to time, but that’s no reason for destroying him.”
“But if we did find out that he was using drugs,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And I’m not sure how we could do this, what then? Would you dismiss him?”
Dr Maketsi shook his head vigorously. “We don’t think about drugs in those terms. It isn’t a question of good behaviour and bad behaviour. I’d look on it as a medical problem and I’d try to help him. I’d try to sort out the problem.”
“But you can’t ‘sort out’ with those people,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Smoking dagga is one thing, but using pills and all the rest is another. Show me one reformed drug addict. Just one. Maybe they exist; I’ve just never seen them.”
Dr Maketsi shrugged. “I know they can be very manipulative people,” he said. “But some of them get off it. I can show you some figures.”
“Well, maybe, maybe not,” said Mma Ramotswe. “The point is: what do you want me to do?”
“Find out about him,” said Dr Maketsi. “Follow him for a few days. Find out whether he’s involved in the drug scene. If he is, find out whether he’s supplying others with drugs while you are about it. Because that will be another problem for us. We keep a tight rein on drugs in the hospital, but things can go missing, and the last thing we want is a doctor who’s passing hospital drug supplies to addicts. We can’t have that.”
“You’d sack him then?” goaded Mma Ramotswe. “You wouldn’t try to help him?”
Dr Maketsi laughed. “We’d sack him good and proper.”
“Good,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And proper too. Now I have to tell you about my fee.”
Dr Maketsi’s face fell. “I was worried about that. This is such a delicate enquiry, I could hardly get the hospital to pay for it.”
Mma Ramotswe nodded knowingly. “You thought that as an old friend …”
“Yes,” said Dr Maketsi quietly. “I thought that as an old friend you might remember how when your Daddy was so ill at the end …”
Mma Ramotswe did remember. Dr Maketsi had come unfailingly to the house every evening for three weeks and eventually had arranged for her Daddy to be put in a private room at the hospital, all for nothing.
“I remember very well,” she said. “I only mentioned the fee to tell you that there would be none.”
SHE HAD all the information she needed to start her investigation of Dr Komoti. She had his address in Kaunda Way; she had a photograph, supplied by Dr Maketsi; and she had a note of the number of the green station wagon which he drove. She had also been given his telephone number, and the number of his postal box at the Post Office, although she could
not imagine the circumstances in which she might need these. Now all she had to do was to start to watch Dr Komoti and to learn as much as she could about him in the shortest possible time.
Dr Maketsi had thoughtfully provided her with a copy of the duty rota in the casualty department for the following four months. This meant that Mma Ramotswe would know exactly when he might be expected to leave the hospital to return home and also when he might be on night duty. This would save a great deal of time and effort in sitting waiting in the street in the tiny white van.
She started two days later. She was there when Dr Komoti drove out of the staff car park at the hospital that afternoon and she followed him discreetly into town, parking a few cars away from him and waiting until he was well away from the car park before she got out of the van. He visited one or two shops and picked up a newspaper from the Book Centre. Then he returned to his car, drove straight home, and stayed there—blamelessly, she assumed—until the lights went out in the house just before ten that evening. It was a dull business sitting in the tiny white van, but Mma Ramotswe was used to it and never complained once she had agreed to take on a matter. She would sit in her van for a whole month, even more, if asked to do so by Dr Maketsi; it was the least she could do after what he had done for her Daddy.
Nothing happened that evening, nor the next evening. Mma Ramotswe was beginning to wonder whether there was ever any variety to the routine of Dr Komoti’s life when suddenly things changed. It was a Friday afternoon, and Mma Ramotswe was ready to follow Dr Komoti back from work. The doctor was slightly late in leaving the hospital, but eventually he came out of the casualty entrance, a stethoscope tucked into the pocket of his white coat, and climbed into his car.
Mma Ramotswe followed him out of the hospital grounds, satisfied that he was not aware of her presence. She suspected that he might go to the Book Centre for his newspaper, but this time instead of turning into town, he turned the other way. Mma Ramotswe was pleased that something at last might be happening, and she concentrated carefully on not losing him as they made their way through the traffic. The roads were busier than usual, as it was a Friday afternoon at the end of the month, and this meant payday. That evening there would be more road accidents than normal, and whoever was taking Dr Komoti’s place in casualty would be kept more than occupied stitching up the drunks and picking the shattered windscreen glass out of the road accident cases.
Mma Ramotswe was surprised to find that Dr Komoti was heading for the Lobatse Road. This was interesting. If he was dealing in drugs, then to use Lobatse as a base would be a good idea. It was close enough to the border, and he might be passing things into South Africa, or picking things up there. Whatever it was, it made him a much more interesting man to follow.
They drove down, the tiny white van straining to keep Dr Komoti’s more powerful car in sight. Mma Ramotswe was not worried about being spotted; the road was busy and there was no reason why Dr Komoti should single out the tiny white van. Once they got to Lobatse of course, she would have to be more circumspect, as he could notice her in the thinner traffic there.
When they did not stop in Lobatse, Mma Ramotswe began to worry. If he was going to drive straight through Lobatse it was possible that he was visiting some village on the other side of the town. But this was rather unlikely, as there was not much on the other side of Lobatse—or not much to interest somebody like Dr Komoti. The only other thing, then, was the border, some miles down the road. Yes! Dr Komoti was going over the border, she was sure of it. He was going to Mafikeng.
As the realisation dawned that Dr Komoti’s destination was out of the country, Mma Ramotswe felt an intense irritation with her own stupidity. She did not have her passport with her; Dr Komoti would go through, and she would have to remain in Botswana. And once he was on the other side, then he could do whatever he liked—and no doubt would—and she would know nothing about it.
She watched him stop at the border post, and then she turned back, like a hunter who has chased his prey to the end of his preserve and must now give up. He would be away for the weekend now, and she knew as little about what he did with his time as she did about the future. Next week, she would have to get back to the tedious task of watching his house by night, in the frustrating knowledge that the real mischief had taken place over the weekend. And while she was doing all this, she would have to postpone other cases—cases which carried fees and paid garage bills.
When she arrived back in Gaborone, Mma Ramotswe was in a thoroughly bad mood. She had an early night, but the bad mood was still with her the following morning when she went into the Mall. As she often did on a Saturday morning, she had a cup of coffee on the verandah of the President Hotel and enjoyed a chat with her friend Grace Gakatsla. Grace, who had a dress shop in Broadhurst, always cheered her up with her stories of the vagaries of her customers. One, a Government Minister’s wife, had recently bought a dress on a Friday and brought it back the following Monday, saying that it did not really fit. Yet Grace had been at the wedding on Saturday where the dress had been worn, and it had looked perfect.
“Of course I couldn’t tell her to her face she was a liar and that I wasn’t a dress-hire shop,” said Grace. “So I asked her if she had enjoyed the wedding. She smiled and said that she had. So I said I enjoyed it too. She obviously hadn’t seen me there. She stopped smiling and she said that maybe she’d give the dress another chance.”
“She’s just a porcupine, that woman,” said Mma Ramotswe. “A hyena,” said Grace. “An anteater, with her long nose.”
The laughter had died away, and Grace had gone off, allowing Mma Ramotswe’s bad mood to settle back in place. It seemed to her that she might continue to feel like this for the rest of the weekend; in fact, she was worried that it could last until the Komoti case was finished—if she ever finished it.
Mma Ramotswe paid her bill and left, and it was then, as she was walking down the front steps of the hotel, that she saw Dr Komoti in the Mall.
FOR A moment Mma Ramotswe stood quite still. Dr Komoti had crossed the border last night just before seven in the evening. The border closed at eight, which meant that he could not possibly have had time to get down to Mafikeng, which was a further forty minutes’ drive, and back in time to cross again before the border closed. So he had only spent one evening there and had come back first thing that morning.
She recovered from her surprise at seeing him and realised that she should make good use of the opportunity to follow him and see what he did. He was now in the hardware store, and Mma Ramotswe lingered outside, looking idly at the contents of the window until he came out again. Then he walked purposefully back to the car park and she watched him getting into his car.
Dr Komoti stayed in for the rest of the day. At six in the evening he went off to the Sun Hotel where he had a drink with two other men, whom Mma Ramotswe recognised as fellow Nigerians. She knew that one of them worked for a firm of accountants, and the other, she believed, was a primary school-teacher somewhere. There was nothing about their meeting which seemed suspicious; there would be many such groups of people meeting right at this moment throughout the town—people thrown together in the artificial closeness of the expatriate life, talking about home.
He stayed an hour and then left, and that was the extent of Dr Komoti’s social life for the weekend. By Sunday evening, Mma Ramotswe had decided that she would report to Dr Maketsi the following week and tell him that there was unfortunately no evidence of his moving in drug-abusing circles and that he seemed, by contrast, to be the model of sobriety and respectability. There was not even a sign of women, unless they were hiding in the house and never came out. Nobody had arrived at the house while she was watching, and nobody had left, apart from Dr Komoti himself. He was, quite simply, rather a boring man to watch.
But there was still the question of Mafikeng and the Friday evening dash there and back. If he had been going shopping down there in the OK Bazaars—as many people did—then he would surely have st
ayed for at least part of Saturday morning, which he clearly did not. He must have done, then, whatever it was he wanted to do on Friday evening. Was there a woman down there—one of those flashy South African women whom men, so unaccountably, seemed to like? That would be the simple explanation, and the most likely one too. But why the hurry back on Saturday morning? Why not stay for Saturday and take her to lunch at the Mmbabatho Hotel? There was something which did not seem quite right, and Mma Ramotswe thought that she might follow him down to Mafikeng next weekend, if he went, and see what happened. If there was nothing to be seen, then she could do some shopping and return on Saturday afternoon. She had been meaning to make the trip anyway, and she might as well kill two birds with one stone.
DR KOMOTI proved obliging. The following Friday he left the hospital on time and drove off in the direction of Lobatse, followed at a distance by Mma Ramotswe in her van. Crossing the border proved tricky, as Mma Ramotswe had to make sure that she did not get too close to him at the border post, and that at the same time she did not lose him on the other side. For a few moments it looked as if she would be delayed, as a ponderous official paged closely through her passport, looking at the stamps which reflected her coming and going to Johannesburg and Mafikeng.
“It says here, under occupation, that you are a detective,” he said in a surly tone. “How can a woman be a detective?”
Mma Ramotswe glared at him. If she prolonged the encounter, she could lose Dr Komoti, whose passport was now being stamped. In a few minutes he would be through the border controls, and the tiny white van would have no chance of catching up with him.
“Many women are detectives,” said Mma Ramotswe, with dignity. “Have you not read Agatha Christie?”
The clerk looked up at her and bristled.