Free The No. 2 Global Detective by Toby Clements

FIVE
    Mma Ontoaste has a drunken realisation but is bitten by a snake on the ankle and then falls in the pumpkin patch (again).
    If lunch at the Salt ’N’ Sauce Scotch Chip Supper Shop had not gone according to plan, thought Mma Ontoaste, it was not her doing. As she had learned over the years, it was always easier to advise other people how to live their lives. The difficulty came, thought Mma Ontoaste, as she found the bottle of neat spirit and a dusty glass on the top shelf in her grass hut, with one’s own life. It was never so easy to know what one ought to do oneself. Today though, she felt like getting absolutely shit-faced, so she thought that is what she ought to do.
    And it was later that evening, just as Mma Ontoaste was stumbling towards the vegetable patch to find a pumpkin to soak up the booze, that it happened. It struck her as she was crossing the yard to her grass hut. She realised suddenly that she had changed. She was no longer the Mma Ontoaste of old. She was no longer full of the kindly wisdom, the love of her land, with the insight and the strength to endure Africa’s countless hardships.
    As she stood rooted in the middle of her shabby yard, looking at her unkempt grass hut, she found herself wondering why she could not have just forgiven Mma Pollosopresso for being so stupid as to only get 97 per cent in her final examination at the Napier Secretarial College. Was not forgiveness what Mma Ontoaste was all about? And if that was so, then why could she not have forgiven that Nigerian for working for the Botswana Postal Service? She had not even bothered to think for a single minute about the circumstances that might make a man, even a Nigerian, eke out an honest living delivering mail when he should be ‘phishing’ for the details of old ladies’ bank accounts. Why had she developed this sudden taste for Irn-Bru? And why was she now riding around Gaborone on a cow?
    But there was more to it than that. Why had she been unable to find out who it really was who had blown up her tiny white van? Why had she just blamed Mma Pollosopresso? And why was she unable to tell that good man, Mr JPS Spagatoni, where his radio had gone? And what about the woman whose husband had gone to work on the bus? That sort of problem should have been meat and drink to a detective of Mma Ontoaste’s stature.
    It struck Mma Ontoaste forcibly then that she had lost her powers of detection but, worse than that, worse than almost anything, she had lost the delightful Feel Good Factor. She was no longer the Miss Read for the 21st century and Gaborone was no longer the sub-Saharan Fairacre that it had once been.
    Mma Ontoaste stood in the yard staring up at the huge white moon that had risen overhead. She started to weep and she let the bitter tears roll down her cheeks and hang off her chin.
    â€˜Oh Rra!’ she cried aloud. ‘Oh, Rra!’
    And it was then that the snake bit her.
    There are more than 60 types of snake in Botswana, but of these only 12 are venomous, so although Mma Ontoaste was unlucky to be bitten by one of these 12 poisonous snakes, a snake known as the lebolobolo, she was at least lucky that it was a baby lebolobolo.
    It was not, however, the relative youth of the snake that had saved the life of Mma Ontoaste. Rather it was the fact that less than quarter of an hour after the snake had bitten her, the stock gate had been pushed open and a woman carrying the most enormous elephant gun you have ever seen had entered the yard and pointed the muzzle at the head of her very nearly late ex-employer.

CHAPTER SIX
    Mma Pollosopresso saves the day but Mr JPS Spagatoni is carted off to hospital where he may or may not die.
    Mma Pollosopresso had always been frightened of snakes and she guessed immediately what had happened to her ex-employer. But as she stood there, pointing the huge gun at Mma Ontoaste’s temple, it occurred to her that this might have made a very fine 11