Hyouka - Volume 03 - The Kudryavka Sequence - Welcome to KANYA FESTA! (1)

The thefts did not occur in any sealed environment. As the A Capella Club
had their cooler box outside, anyone could have stolen its contents if they
wished; the Go Club did not have a lock in their room; the Fortune Telling
Association only had one person, so the culprit only needed to wait within the
restroom nearby; the Gardening Club was targeted when they decided to
leave the room for a bit; and then there's the Magic Club yesterday. Not
knowing when the item was stolen, anybody could be a suspect, hidden
within the sea of anonymity.
First, the culprit is no doubt a student of our school. It's difficult to conceive
of someone from outside our school planning something like this and
carrying it out for two consecutive days. But this still means there are nearly
a thousand suspects. A thousand! It would be a bit silly and pointless to
declare "The suspect is amongst these thousand people!" Even a proper law
enforcement agency would have their work cut out questioning the alibis of a
thousand people.
...The only place that was strange was The Cooking Club. If I were to believe
their president who said they had prepared a ladle, then it means the ladle was
stolen just before the Wild Fire contest began. As the culprit had the time to
prepare a declaration of crime and the Kanya Festival Guide, there was a
possibility that the culprit had come from within.
However, would members of The Cooking Club want to obstruct the Wild
Fire tournament, which requires a lot of meticulous preparation? A ladle is
one of the most basic kitchen utensils. What if we had decided to make a
stew dish instead? It would have quickly aroused suspicion. Surely it would
make more sense for the culprit to pick a less risky target like the Occult
Studies Club ([O]KARUTO KEN オカルト 研 ) or the "Cheering Club
([O]UENDAN 応 援 団 ) and Cheerleading Club Combined."
I decided to discard that possibility.
Then how am I supposed to trim down the number of suspects from these
thousand people?
...Then again, a serial killer or serial arsonist would have been difficult to find
as the suspect base would be huge. In most detective fiction, they would