Mma Ramotswe wondered whether to join in this speculative conversation, but decided against it, and sat back until the two of them should finish. But Tati Monyena rose to his feet instead and gestured towards the door. “I shall take you to the ward,” he said. “You will see the bed where these things happened.”
They left his office and walked down a green-painted corridor. There was a hospital smell in the air, that mixture of humanity and disinfectant, and, in the background, the sound that seemed to go so well with that smell—voices somewhere, the sound of a child crying, the noise of wheels being pushed over uneven floors, the faint hum of machinery. There were posters on the walclass="underline" warnings about disease and the need to be careful; a picture of a blood spill. This, ultimately, was what our life was about, she thought, and hospitals were there to remind us: biology, human need, human suffering.
They passed a nurse in the corridor. She was carrying a pan of some sort, covered with a stained cloth, and she smiled and half-turned to let them pass. Mma Ramotswe kept her gaze studiously away from the pan and on the nurse’s face. It was a kind face, the sort that one trusted, unlike, she imagined, the face of the doctor whom Mr Polopetsi had described.
“It’s changed since your father was here,” said Tati Monyena. “In those days we had to make do with so little. Now we have much more.”
“But there is never enough, is there?” said Mr Polopetsi. “We get drugs for one illness and then a new illness comes along. Or a new type of the same thing. Same devil, different clothes. Look at TB.”
Tati Monyena sighed. “That is true. I was talking to one of the doctors the other day and he said, We thought that we had it cracked. We really did. And now…”
But at least we can try, thought Mma Ramotswe. That is all we can do. We can try. And that, surely, is what doctors did. They did not throw up their hands and give up; they tried.
They turned a corner. A small boy, three or four years old, wearing only a vest, his tiny stomach protruding in a small mound, his eyes wide, stood in their way. The hospital was full of such children, the offspring of patients or patients themselves, and Tati Monyena barely saw him. But the child looked at Mma Ramotswe and came up to her and reached for her hand, as children will, especially in Africa, where they will still come to you. She bent down and lifted him up. He looked at her and snuggled his head against her chest.
“The mother of that one is late,” said Tati Monyena in a matter-of-fact voice. “Our people are deciding what to do. The nurses are looking after him.”
The child looked up at Mma Ramotswe. She saw that his eyes were shallow; there was no light in them. His skin, she felt, was dry.
Tati Monyena waited for her to put the child down. Then he indicated towards a further corridor to the right. “It is this way,” he said.
The ward doors were open. It was a long room, with six beds on either side. At the far end of the room, at a desk with several cabinets about it, a nurse was sitting, looking at a piece of paper with another nurse who was leaning over her shoulder. Halfway down the ward, another couple of nurses were adjusting the sheets on one of the beds, propping up the patient against a high bank of pillows. A drugs trolley stood unattended at the foot of another bed, an array of small containers on its top shelf.
When she saw them at the door, the nurse at the desk rose to her feet and walked down the ward to meet them. She nodded to Mma Ramotswe and Mr Polopetsi and then looked enquiringly at Tati Monyena.
“This lady is dealing with that…that matter,” said Tati Monyena, nodding at the bed on his left. “I spoke to you about her.” He turned to Mma Ramotswe. “This is Sister Batshegi.”
Mma Ramotswe was watching the nurse’s expression. She knew that the first moments were the significant ones, and that people gave away so much before they had time to think and to compose themselves. Sister Batshegi had looked down, not meeting Mma Ramotswe’s gaze, and then had looked up again. Did that mean anything? Mma Ramotswe thought that it meant that she was not particularly pleased to see her. But that in itself did not tell her very much. People who are busy with some task—as Sister Batshegi clearly had been—were not always pleased to be disturbed.
“I am happy to see you, Mma,” said Sister Batshegi.
Mma Ramotswe replied to the greeting and then turned to Tati Monyena. “That is the bed, Rra?”
“It is.” He looked at Sister Batshegi. “Have you had anybody in it over the last few days?”
The nurse shook her head. “There has been nobody. The last patient was that man last week—the one who had the motorcycle accident near Pilane. He got better quickly.” She turned to Mma Ramotswe. “Every time I see a motorcyle, Mma, I think of the young men we get in here…” She shrugged. “But they never think of that. They don’t.”
“Young men often don’t think,” said Mma Ramotswe. “They cannot help it. That is how they are.” She thought of the apprentices, and reflected on what a good illustration they were of the proposition she had just made. But they would start to think sooner or later, she told herself; even Charlie would start to think. She looked at the bed, covered in its neat white sheet. Although the sheet was clean, there were brown stains on it, the stains of blood that the hospital laundry could not remove. At the top of the bed, to the side, she saw a machine with tubes and dials on a stand.
“That is a ventilator,” said Tati Monyena. “It helps people to breathe. All three patients…” He paused, and looked at Sister Batshegi, as if for confirmation. “All three patients were on it at the time. But the machine was thoroughly checked and there was nothing wrong with it.”
Sister Batshegi nodded. “The machine was working. And we checked the alarm. It has a battery, which was working fine. If the machine had been faulty we would have known.”
“So you can rule out a defective ventilator,” said Tati Monyena. “That is not what caused it.”
Sister Batshegi was vigorously of the same mind. “No. It is not that. That is not what happened.”
Mma Ramotswe looked about her. One of the patients at the end of the ward was calling out, a cracked, unhappy voice. A nurse went over to the bed quickly.
“I have to get on with my work,” said Sister Batshegi. “You may look round, Mma, but you will find nothing. There is nothing to see in this place. It is just a ward. That is all.”
MMA RAMOTSWE and Mr Polopetsi spoke to Sister Batshegi again, along with two other nurses, in Tati Monyena’s office. He had left them alone, as he had promised, but through the window they saw him hovering around anxiously in the courtyard outside, looking at his watch and fiddling with a line of pens that he had clipped in his shirt pocket. Sister Batshegi said little more than she had said in the ward, and the other two nurses, both of whom had been on duty at the time of the incidents, seemed very unwilling to say much at all. The deaths had been a surprise, they said, but they often lost very ill patients. Neither had been nearby at the time, they said, although they were quick to point out that they were both keeping a close watch on the patients involved. “If anything had happened, we would have known it,” said one of the nurses. “It is not our fault, you see, Mma. It is just not our fault.”
It did not take long to interview them, and then Mma Ramotswe and Mr Polopetsi were alone in the office before Tati Monyena came back.
“Those nurses were scared about something,” said Mr Polopetsi. “Did you see the way they looked? Did you hear it in their voices?”
Mma Ramotswe had to agree. “But what are they scared of?” she asked.
Mr Polopetsi thought for a moment. “They are scared of some person,” he said. “Some unknown person is frightening them.”
“Sister Batshegi?”