They helped themselves at the hot-food counter and made their way over to a small, red-topped table at the far end of the canteen. Tati Monyena, sensing that something important was coming, had now become edgy. As he lowered his tray onto the table, Mma Ramotswe could not help but notice that there was a tremor in his hands. He is shaking because he senses that I know something, she thought. Now he is feeling dread. There will be no senior job for him now. This was not the part of her job that she liked: the painful spelling out of the truth, the exposure.
She looked down at her plate. There was a piece of beef on it, some mashed potatoes, and green peas. It was a good lunch.
Suddenly, without having thought about it beforehand, she felt impelled to say grace. “Do you mind if I say grace for us?” she said quietly.
He gave his assent. “That would be good,” he said. His voice sounded strained.
Mma Ramotswe lowered her head. The smell of the beef was in her nostrils; and that of the mashed potatoes too, a slightly chalky, earthy smell. “We are grateful for this good food,” she said. “And we are grateful for the work of this hospital, which is good work. And if there are things that go wrong in this place, then we remember that there is always mercy. As mercy is shown to all of us, so we can show it to our brothers and sisters.”
She did not really know why she said this, but she said it, and when she stopped, and was silent, Tati Monyena was silent too, so that she heard his breathing from across the table. “That is all,” she said, and looked up.
When she saw his eyes, she did not need to tell him that she had found out what had happened.
“I saw you talking to the cleaner,” he said. “From my office. I saw you talking to her.”
Mma Ramotswe kept her gaze upon him. “If you knew, Rra, all along, then why…”
He raised his fork, and then put it down again. It was as if he had been somehow defeated, and there was no point now in eating. “I found out by chance, only by chance. I asked who had been present in the ward just before the third patient went and one of the nurses happened to mention that the cleaner had left the ward just before it happened. She always polished the floor there at the same time on a Friday morning. So I spoke to her and asked her to tell me exactly what she did in the ward.”
Mma Ramotswe encouraged him. She was keen to hear his description of events, and relieved to find out that it tallied with what the cleaner had told her. This meant that he was no longer lying.
“She told me,” Tati Monyena went on. “She told me that she plugged her polisher in near the door. Near the bed by the window. I asked her how she did this and she said that she simply unplugged the plugs that were already in. Just for a few minutes, she said. Just for a few minutes.”
Mma Ramotswe looked down at her mashed potatoes. They were getting cold, and would become hard, but this was no time for such thoughts. “And so she unplugged the ventilator,” she said. “Just long enough for the patient to become late. And then she plugged it back in. But the damage had been done.”
“Yes,” said Tati Monyena, shaking his head with regret. “That machine is not the most modern machine. It has an alarm, which probably sounded, but with the whirring sound of that old floor polisher nobody would hear it. Then, when the nurses checked, they found that the machine was still operating properly, but the patient was gone. It was too late.”
Mma Ramotswe reflected on this. “So did the cleaner know what had happened?”
“She knew that there had been an incident in the ward,” Tati Monyena replied. “But of course she did not know that it had anything to do with her. She…” He stopped. He was looking at Mma Ramotswe with an expression that said only one thing, Please understand.
She picked up her fork and dug it into the potatoes. A little skin had formed on the top, a powdery white skin. “You didn’t want her to know that she had killed somebody, Rra? Is that it?”
His voice was urgent as he replied; urgent, and full of relief that she should understand. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Mma. Yes. She is a very good woman. She has small children and no husband. The husband is late. You’ll know why. He was ill with that for a long time, Mma, a long time. She herself is on…on treatment. She is one of the best workers we have in the hospital, and you can ask anybody, anybody. They will all say the same.”
“It is not just because she is your cousin?”
This took him by surprise, and he looked aghast. “That is true,” he said. “But what I said about her is also true. I did not want her to suffer. I know how she would feel if she found out that she was responsible for somebody’s death. How would you feel, Mma, if you knew that about yourself? And she would lose her job. It wouldn’t be my decision, it would be the decision of somebody back there…” He gestured through the window, in the direction of Gaborone. “Somebody in a big office would say that she had been responsible for the deaths of three people and should be fired. They would say, carelessness. They wouldn’t blame me, though, or the head of the medical staff, or anybody else; they would blame the person at the bottom, that lady. Fire the cleaner, and end the matter there.”
Mma Ramotswe took a mouthful of potato. It was slightly bitter in the mouth, but that was what truth was sometimes like too. She could think about this problem, and then think about it again, looking at it from every direction. Whichever way one thought of it, though, it would still have the same feel to it, would still raise the same questions. Three people had died. They were all elderly people, she had found out, and none of them had dependants. Nothing could be done to help them now, wherever they were. And, if they were anything like the elderly people of Mochudi whom she had known, people of Obed Ramotswe’s generation, they would not be ones to want to make difficulties for the living. They would not want to see that woman put out of her job. They would not wish to add to her difficulties; that poor woman who was working so hard, with that other thing hanging over her head, that uncertain sentence.
“You made the right decision, Rra,” she said to Tati Monyena. “Now let us eat our lunch and talk about other matters. Relatives, for example. They are always doing something new, aren’t they?”
Now he knew what her grace had meant, and he wanted to say something about that, to thank her for her mercy, but he could not talk. He expressed his relief in tears, which he mopped at, embarrassed, with a handkerchief that she supplied, wordlessly. There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride—for the people who worked in that hospital, who looked after others, who took risks themselves of infection, of disease—from an accidental cut, a needle injury incurred at work; there were many tears of pride to be shed for them, for their bravery. And one of them, she thought, was Dr Cronje.
THE NEXT DAY, Mma Ramotswe dictated a report for Tati Monyena’s superiors, which Mma Makutsi took down in shorthand, ending each sentence with a flourish of her pencil, as if to express satisfaction at the outcome. She had told her assistant what had happened at the hospital, and Mma Makutsi had listened, open-mouthed. “Such a simple explanation,” she said. “And nobody thought of it until you did, Mma Ramotswe.”
“It was just something I saw,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I did not do anything very special.”
“You are always very modest,” said Mma Makutsi. “You never take any credit for these things. Never.”