Free The No. 2 Global Detective by Toby Clements Page B

staggered to his feet and made to rush at Mma Pollosopresso, waving his bottle of whisky like a
knobkerrie
.
    â€˜Ah’ll ’ave ya! Ah’ll … Aaaah!’
    Mr JPS Spagatoni, that drunk man, tripped on the stoop and fell heavily, the bottle of whisky spinning out of his hand and rattling across the setts to vanish under some unnamed bush. Mma Pollosopresso stood for a moment and watched nervously as he tried to right himself. He burped deeply and then vomited a chunky concoction of fish and chips and whisky and beer before finally giving up the ghost and subsiding with a muttered curse and a vague threat.
    By now Mma Pollosopresso had found the bites: two tiny punctures on Mma Ontoaste’s meaty calf, and then the snake itself, crushed beneath her ex-employer. Mma Pollosopresso recognised the baby lebolobolo for what it was, and compared the bulk of Mma Ontoaste with that of the snake.
    The lebolobolo was not a
very
poisonous snake, was it? And a stay in the hospital in Gaborone, for all of Botswana’s undoubted beauty, was not something everybody would enjoy equally. People had been known to die in the hospital, had they not? And she did not want this to happen to Mma Ontoaste. It occurred to her that, once the antivenom was administered, then perhaps it would be better if Mma Ontoaste stayed in her own bed and fought the poison where she was most comfortable.
    When Dennis arrived with the minibus half an hour later, and once the antivenom was administered, Mma Pollosopresso asked the medic and the driver to help her move the redoubtable founder of The Best Detective Agency in the World Ever! No. 2 across the yard into the grass hut.
    â€˜But Mma,’ began the driver. ‘I have to bring a body back to the hospital. It is the rules.’
    No one asked why this particular rule might be in force. It was not the time or the place. Instead the story carried on and each pair of eyes drifted down to where Mr JPS Spagatoni was lying in his pool of sick. He was much lighter than Mma Ontoaste anyway, and he looked as if he would be easier to get into the back of the minibus, and so it was decided. Once they had got him in, bumping his head on the door as they went, they moved Mma Ontoaste. It was a struggle but after half an hour they managed to drag her into her hut and onto the bed, where she lay breathing heavily but regularly.
    And all that Mma Pollosopresso and Dennis needed to do was sit there and watch, occasionally pouring sips of water into her mouth and now and then mopping her brow with one of the countless pieces of lint that that not-so-good man Mr JPS Spagatoni kept lying about the place. All through the night, as the antivenom took hold, Mma Pollosopresso kept up her bedside vigil as her ex-employer hovered between life and death. It was an uncomfortable night for all concerned, but by dawn (‘sudden’ and ‘tropical’) it began to look as if the redoubtable founder of The Best Detective Agency in the World Ever! No. 2 would live, which was just as well because later that morning she was due to meet Tom Hurst, but it was more than could be said with any great certainty about Mr JPS Spagatoni, who, during the night, had received an unnecessary blood transfusion from an unqualified medic and was now lying sweating on a trolley in a corridor waiting for the attentions of a doctor who had long since gone to work in England, where the wages, if not the weather or the people, were better.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Mma Ontoaste starts early and becomes a bit confused but it is all right in the end because it did not matter very much anyway and then a trip is planned!
    The sky above her was as blue as it had ever been when Mma Delicious Ontoaste found herself sitting outside the café at the Sir Seretse Kharma International Airport, staring at the mug of bush tea on the table before her. Those who knew the impressively padded founder of The Best Detective Agency in the World Ever! No. 2 ,