The Great Cake Mystery Read online

  ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

  Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, the 44 Scotland Street series, and the Corduroy Mansions series. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and lives in Scotland, where in his spare time he is a bassoonist in the RTO (Really Terrible Orchestra).

  www.alexandermccallsmith.com

  BOOKS IN THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES

  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

  Tears of the Giraffe

  Morality for Beautiful Girls

  The Kalahari Typing School for Men

  The Full Cupboard of Life

  In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

  Blue Shoes and Happiness

  The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

  The Miracle at Speedy Motors

  Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

  The Double Comfort Safari Club

  The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

  The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, APRIL 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Alexander McCall Smith

  Illustrations copyright © 2010, 2011 by Iain McIntosh

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The illustrations in this work were originally published as part of Precious and the Puggies:

  Precious Ramotswe’s Very First Case,

  a Scots-language edition published by Itchy Coo,

  Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2010.

  Translation copyright © 2010 by James Robertson.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948–

  [Precious and the monkeys]

  The great cake mystery : Precious Ramotswe’s very first case / by Alexander McCall Smith; illustrated by Iain McIntosh.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74390-9

  1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Botswana—Fiction.

  I. McIntosh, Iain, III. II. Title.

  PZ7.M47833755Gr 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011026494

  www.anchorbooks.com

  Cover design by Iain McIntosh

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  ave you ever said to yourself, Wouldn’t it be nice to be a detective? Most of us will never have the chance to make that dream come true. Detectives, you see, are born that way. Right from the beginning they just know that this is what they want to be. And right from the beginning they show that solving mysteries is something they can do rather well.

  This is the story about a girl who became a detective. Her name was Precious.

  Precious smiled a lot. She often smiled even when she was not thinking about anything in particular. Nice people smile a lot, and Precious Ramotswe was one of the nicest girls in Botswana. Everyone said so.

  Botswana was the country she lived in. It was down toward the bottom of Africa. She lived in a wide dry land, which had a lot of amazing things to see.

  There was the Kalahari Desert, a great stretch of dry grass and thorn trees that went on and on into the distance, farther than any eye can see. Then there was the great river in the north, which flowed the wrong way. It did not flow into the ocean, as rivers usually do, but back into the heart of Africa. When it reached the sands of the Kalahari, it drained away, just like water disappears down the drain of a bath.

  But most interesting, of course, were the wild animals. There were many of these in Botswana: lions, elephants, leopards, monkeys—the list goes on. Precious had not seen all of these animals, but she had heard about most of them. Her father, a kind man whose name was Obed, often spoke about them, and she loved the tales he told.

  “Tell me about the time you were nearly eaten by a lion,” she would ask. And Obed, who had told her that story perhaps a hundred times before, would tell her again. And it was every bit as exciting each time he told it.

  “I was a young man then,” he began.

  “How young?” asked Precious.

  “About eighteen, I think,” he said. “I went up north to see my uncle, who lived way out in the country, or the bush as we call it in Africa, very far from everywhere.”

  “Did anybody else live there?” asked Precious. She was always asking questions, which was a sign that she might become a good detective. Do you like to ask questions? Many people who ask lots of questions become detectives, because that is what detectives do. They ask a lot of questions.

  “It was a very small village,” Obed said. “It was just a few huts, really, and a fenced place where they kept the cattle. They had this fence, you see, which protected the cattle from the lions at night.”

  This fence had to be quite strong. A few strands of wire cannot keep lions out. That is hopeless when it comes to lions—they would just knock down such a fence with a single blow of their paw. A proper lion fence has to be made of strong poles, from the trunks of trees.

  “So there I was,” Obed said. “I had gone to spend a few days with my uncle and his family. They were good to me and I liked my cousins. There were six of them—four boys and two girls. We had many adventures together.

  “I slept in one of the huts with three of the boys. We did not have beds in those days—we had sleeping mats made out of reeds, which we laid out on the floor of the hut. They were nice to sleep on. They were much cooler than a bed and blankets in the hot weather, and easier to store too.”

  Precious was quiet now. This was the part of the story that she liked the best.

  “And then,” her father said, “and then one night I woke up to a strange sound. It was like the sound a large pig will make when it’s sniffing about for food, only a little bit quieter.”

  “Did you know what it was?” she asked, holding her breath as she waited for her father to reply. She knew what the answer would be, of course. She had heard the story so many times. But it was always exciting, always enough to keep you sitting on the very edge of your seat.

  He shook his head. “No, I didn’t. And that was why I thought I should go outside and find out.”

  Precious closed her eyes tight. She could hardly bear to hear what was coming.

  “It was a lion,” her father said. “And he was right outside the hut, standing there, looking at me from underneath his great dark mane.”

  recious opened her eyes cautiously, one at a time, just in case there was a lion in the room. But there was just her father, telling his story.

  “How did that lion get in?” she asked. “How did he get past that big strong fence?”

  Obed shook his head. “Somebody had not closed the gate properly,” he said. “It was carelessness.”

  What would you do if you found yourself face to face with a great lion? Perhaps you would just close your eyes and hope that you were dreaming—that is what Obed did when he saw the terrifying lion staring straight at him. But when he opened his eyes again, the lion was still there, and worse still, was beginning to open its great mouth.

  Precious caught her breath. “Did you see his teeth?” she asked.
<
br />   Obed nodded. “The moonlight was very bright,” he said. “His big teeth were white and sharp.”

  Precious shuddered and listened intently as her father explained what happened next.

  Obed turned his head very slowly. He could not get back to the hut. It would take him too close to the beast. But, just a few steps away, were the family’s grain bins. These were like garden pots—but much bigger—that were used for storing corn. They were made out of pressed mud, baked hard by the hot sun, and they were very strong.

  “I ran—not back to the hut, but to the nearest grain bin. I pushed the cover back and jumped in, bringing the lid down on top of my head. I was safe! Or so I thought.”

  Precious breathed a sigh of relief.

  “There was very little grain left in that bin,” Obed said. “So there was plenty of room for me to crouch down.”

  “And spiders too?” asked Precious, with a shudder.

  “There are always spiders in grain bins,” said Obed. “But it wasn’t spiders I was worried about.”

  “It was—”

  Obed finished the sentence for her. “Yes, it was the lion. I could hear him outside, scratching and snuffling at the lid.

  “I knew that it would only be a matter of time before he pushed the lid off with one of his big paws, and I knew that I had to do something. But what could I do?

  “So I took a handful of those dusty husks and then, pushing up the lid a tiny bit, I tossed them straight into the face of the lion.”

  Precious looked at her father wide-eyed. This was the best part of the story.

  “And what did he do?” she asked.

  Obed smiled. “He breathed them in and then he gave the loudest, most powerful sneeze that has ever been sneezed in Botswana, or possibly in all Africa. Ka … chow!

  “It was a very great sneeze,” Obed said. “It was a sneeze that was heard from miles away, and it was certainly heard by everybody in the village. In every hut, people awoke, rubbed their eyes, and rose from their sleeping mats. ‘A great lion has sneezed,’ they said. ‘We must all hit our pots and pans as hard as we can. That will frighten him away.’

  “And that is what happened. As the people began to strike their pots and pans with spoons and forks, the lion tucked his tail between his legs and ran off into the bush. He was not frightened of eating one unlucky young man, but even he could not stand up to a whole village of people all pounding on pots. Lions do not like that sort of noise.”

  “I am glad that you were not eaten by that lion,” Precious said.

  “And so am I,” Obed said.

  “Because if the lion had eaten you, I would never have been born,” Precious said.

  “And if you had never been born, then I would never have been able to get to know the brightest and nicest girl in all Botswana,” said her father.

  Precious thought for a moment. “So it would have been a bad thing for both of us.”

  “Yes,” said Obed. “And maybe a bad thing for the lion too.”

  “Oh, why was that?”

  “Because I might have given him indigestion,” said Obed. “It’s well known that if a lion eats a person who’s feeling cross at the time, he gets indigestion.”

  Precious was not sure whether this was true, or whether he was just making it up to amuse her. She decided that it was not true and told him so.

  He smiled and looked at her in a curious way. “You can tell when people are making things up, can’t you?”

  Precious nodded. She thought that was probably right—she could tell.

  “Perhaps you will become a detective one day,” he said.

  hen her father said to her that one day she might become a detective, she at first thought, What a strange idea, but then she asked herself, Why not? “Yes, I could be a detective,” Precious said. “But surely it will be years and years before I get a case.”

  She was wrong about that. A case came up sooner than she thought it would. Detectives say their first case is always the hardest. Well, Precious was not sure if that was true for her, but her first case was certainly not easy. This is what happened.

  The school Precious went to was on a hill. This meant that the children had a long climb in the mornings, but it was a wonderful place for their lessons. Looking out of the windows, they could gaze out to where other little hills popped up like rocks in a stream. And you could hear sounds from far away too—the tinkling of cattle bells, the rumbling of thunder far off in the distance, the cry of a hawk soaring in the wind.

  It was, as you can imagine, a very happy school. The teachers were happy to be working in such a nice town, the children were happy to have kind teachers who did not shout at them, and even the school cat, who had a comfortable den outside, was happy with the mice that could be chased. But then something happened.

  What happened was that there was a thief. Now, most people don’t steal things. Most people know you should not take things that belong to others. For many of us, that is Rule Number One.

  So, a thief … and a thief at school too!

  The first person to notice what was going on was Tapiwa (TAP-EE-WAH) a girl in the same class as Precious.

  “Do you know what?” she whispered to Precious as they walked home after school one afternoon.

  “No,” said Precious. “What?”

  “There must be a thief at school,” Tapiwa said, looking over her shoulder in case anybody heard what she had to say. “I brought a piece of cake to school with me this morning. I left it in my bag in the hallway outside the classroom.” She paused. “I was really looking forward to eating it at break-time.”

  “I love cake,” Precious said. She closed her eyes and thought of some of the cakes she enjoyed. Cakes with thick icing. Cakes with jam on top of them. Cakes sprinkled with sugar and then dipped in little colored sugarballs. There were so many cakes … and all of them were so delicious.

  “Somebody took my cake,” Tapiwa complained. “I had wrapped it in a small piece of paper. Well, it was gone, and I found the paper lying on the floor.”

  Precious frowned. “Gone?”

  “Eaten up,” said Tapiwa. “There were crumbs on the floor and little bits of icing. I picked them up and tasted them. I could tell that they came from my cake.”

  “Did you tell the teacher?” asked Precious.

  Her friend sighed. “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t think that she believed me. She said, ‘Are you sure you didn’t forget that you ate it?’ She said that this sometimes happened. People ate a piece of cake and then forgot that they had done so.”

  Precious looked at Tapiwa. Was she the sort of person to eat a piece of cake and then forget all about it? She did not think so.

  “It was stolen,” Tapiwa said. “That’s what happened. There’s a thief in the school. Who do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know,” Precious said. She found it hard to imagine any member of their class doing something like that. Everybody seemed so honest. And yet, when you came to think of it, if there were grown-up thieves, then those thieves must have been children once, and perhaps they were already thieves even when they were young. Or did people only become thieves a bit later on? It was a very interesting question, and she would have to think about it a bit more. Which was what she did as she walked home that day, under that high, hot African sun. She thought about thieves and what a detective would do about them.

  he might easily have forgotten all about it—after all, it was only a piece of cake—but the next day it happened again. This time it was a piece of bread that was stolen—not an ordinary piece of bread, though: this one was covered in delicious strawberry jam. You can lose a plain piece of bread and not think twice about it, but when you lose one spread thickly with strawberry jam it’s an altogether more serious matter.

  The owner of this piece of bread (with jam) was a boy called Sepo. Everybody liked this boy because he had a habit of saying funny things. If somebody can say something funny, then that often makes everybody feel happ
y.

  If you saw such a piece of bread sitting on a plate your mouth would surely begin to water. And yes, you might imagine how delicious it would taste. But would you really eat it if you knew it belonged to somebody else? Of course not.

  It happened at lunchtime. Every day, at twelve o’clock precisely, the school cook, a very large lady called Big Mrs. Molipi (MO–LEE–PEE), would bang a saucepan with a ladle. This was the signal for all the children to sit down on the porch and wait to be given a plate of food that she had cooked with her assistant and cousin. This assistant was called Not-so-Big Mrs. Molipi, and, as the name tells us, she was much smaller than the chief cook herself. “Time for lunch!” Big Mrs. Molipi shouted in her very loud voice.

  Then Not-so-Big Mrs. Molipi shouted, in a much smaller, squeakier voice, “Time for lunch!”

  Big Mrs. Molipi’s food was all right, but just all right. It was, in fact, a bit boring, since she only had one recipe, it seemed, which was a sort of paste made out of corn and served with green peas and mashed turnips.

  “It’s very healthy,” said Big Mrs. Molipi. “So stop complaining, children, and eat up!”

  “Yes,” said Not-so-Big Mrs. Molipi. “So stop complaining, children, and eat up!”

  Not-so-Big Mrs. Molipi did not say anything other than what she heard her larger cousin say. She thought it was safer that way. If you said anything new, she imagined, then people could look at you, and Not-so-Big Mrs. Molipi did not like the thought of that.

  It was no surprise that many of the children liked to make lunch a little bit more interesting by bringing their own food. Some brought a bit of fruit, or a sugar doughnut, or perhaps a cookie. Then, after lunch, when they all had a bit of free time before going back into the classroom, they would eat these special treats.