Nadine arrived at the office at 6.15am. She needed to finish the accounts for the auditors by the end of the day, and there were a few things that needed sorting. She’d decided yesterday she would get in as early as possible so she’d be done by lunch time. She never liked to wait until the last minute to finish things; she didn’t understand people who did. For her it added unneeded stress. If Nadine had had her way, the accounts would have been long ready.

She’d found a few anomalies to query in some of the transactions, and had asked her boss, Dick Solomon, to attend to them, so she could finish. That was three days ago. But Dick did not believe in stressing about anything. His laid-back attitude was good in some ways, but right now Nadine needed him to attend to her queries. She’d hoped he had left the information on her desk as he had promised he would the day before, but he hadn’t. She would have to be very firm with him when he got in, likely at about 9.30, as was usually the case.

MasterChem was not a complicated business. They had two sections: pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, each with a handful of products. The auditors required everything to add up: supplies coming in had to tally with the products being manufactured.

But now there was the problem Nadine had found. One of their most popular products was Cold Stop. It seemed, according to invoices from the suppliers, that too much of some of the ingredients had been ordered. The extra supplies were possibly lost in the inventory, expiring in some storeroom. Nadine needed Dick to follow up so she could finish the accounts, but he hadn’t, and now she had come in early for nothing. She tried not to get angry.

She picked up her phone to call her boyfriend, Kenosi, but then noticed the time: 6.30am. Kenosi was a criminal defence attorney and, unless he had to be in court early, he usually went into the office after the morning rush hour. His clients seemed to prefer doing business in the late afternoon and evening, so Kenosi’s day started later and ended later than the rest of the world. She wouldn’t phone and wake him up.

Nadine decided she might as well make herself some coffee and headed to the kitchen at the end of the passage. As she passed the last office, she felt something sticky under her shoe. When she looked at where she had stepped, she saw a smear of dark red.

“What on earth is that?” she said. She bent down and looked closer. “Was that … blood?” Then she noticed there were two more tiny drops, the last one at the entrance to her boss Dick’s office.

Nadine hesitated. By nature she was not a brave person, and drops of blood were not a good sign. But what could she do?

The door to Dick’s office was closed. She opened it carefully, still looking down at the floor. Her boss’s office was wall-to-wall carpet, brown in colour; blood was never going to show. Nadine exhaled: at least no more blood drops to find. Then she looked up.

Something was not right. She could see the base of Dick’s office chair, now tipped on its side. It was to the left of his massive oak desk in front of the window, outside of which the sun was just peeking over the Gaborone skyline. The wheels of the chair hung in the air awkwardly, not used to being in the position that they found themselves.

Nadine stepped closer to the desk, despite everything inside of her screaming not to. She had to: who else was there to do it, if not her?

And there was Dick.

Nadine jumped back but, surprisingly, didn’t scream. There was no need to check if her boss needed an ambulance. There was a hole in the middle of his forehead, the source of the blood drops in the passage, she suspected. Plus, the unnaturally pale, matte look of his skin told Nadine that her boss was dead, and likely had been for some hours.

She rushed back to her desk and made two phone calls: one to the police and one to wake up Kenosi. She wasn’t sure why she thought it was a good idea to have a lawyer present. Maybe it was all of the detective shows she watched on TV. She knew from those that the finder of the body was usually the first suspect to eliminate as the murderer.

 ***

Tell us: Do you think Nadine will need a lawyer?