A quarter of an hour later, all the witnesses had been assembled at the bank. April, Tom, Neil and Mr Chelsea were watching Constable Pike as he carried out his investigation. Joe and Loretta were there too, not for any particularly good reason except that it was hard to tell Loretta not to do something she’d set her mind on.

‘You’re getting mud everywhere!’ complained the bank manager.

Constable Pike was pacing out the distance of the crime scene. ‘I need to figure out where everyone was standing,’ he argued.

‘It’s a bank robbery,’ said April. ‘Surely they will send a forensic team up from the city? You getting mud everywhere will just contaminate the evidence.’

‘You’re getting mud everywhere too,’ Constable Pike pointed out petulantly.

April, Tom and Joe were all standing in puddles of mud that had dripped off their clothes as they watched Constable Pike at work.

‘Yes, but I’m a twelve-year-old schoolgirl,’ said April. ‘I haven’t been professionally trained not to contaminate crime scenes and compromise major investigations.’

Constable Pike ignored her and asked the bank manager, ‘Have you got security camera footage?’

‘Of course we do,’ said the bank manager. ‘This is a bank, not a convenience store. We don’t stick up fake cameras hoping thieves will be too stupid to know the difference.’

‘Thieves and police,’ muttered April.

Tom sniggered.

The bank manager placed a laptop on the counter. She clicked on an icon and security camera footage of the bank appeared on the screen. ‘Here’s the relevant time,’ said the manager. She turned the laptop so Constable Pike could see. He reached forward to adjust the screen but the manager slapped his hand away. ‘Don’t get mud on my laptop.’

The bank manager had a younger brother who had been friends with Constable Pike when they were at primary school. It’s impossible to respect someone once you’ve seen them playing Bottom in a really bad school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Constable Pike wiped his muddy hand on his even muddier pants and watched the footage. There was no sound, but you could tell that April and Tom were arguing. They reached the bit where Neil burst in, then Neil and Tom started wrestling.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Tom. ‘What’s everyone watching?’

‘It looks like you and Neil are hugging really passionately,’ said April.

‘We were not!’ exclaimed Neil. ‘We were wrestling.’

‘Hugging, wrestling, it all looks the same on silent black-and-white footage,’ said April.

On the screen the door burst open again and Neil was knocked down. ‘Did you see that?!’ exclaimed April, backhanding Constable Pike in the ribs to get his attention. ‘That robber assaulted Neil with a door.’

‘You just assaulted me with your hand,’ complained Constable Pike, rubbing his ribs.

‘Puh-lease,’ said April, whacking Constable Pike in the ribs again. ‘That is reasonable force.’

‘There is rarely a nanosecond when you’re not doing something unreasonable,’ said Tom. ‘And if you’re not, your dog is.’

Pumpkin barked. It was quite true. At that moment he was happily chewing a loan application.

On screen, the bank robber could now be seen threatening the manager.

Constable Pike peered closer at the monitor. ‘That could be anyone. They’re covered in so much mud it’s impossible to tell. You can’t see their face. And there is so much mud on their clothes you can’t even get a sense of their body shape.’

‘DNA?’ asked Neil. He loved reading about crime and how you could get away with it, so he knew quite a lot about DNA.

‘You’d need hair or skin cells,’ said April. ‘And the robber didn’t stop to do their hair or bleed on the floor at any stage during the robbery.’

‘I can’t tell anything from the footprints either,’ said Constable Pike. The floor was just a big mess of muddy smears. ‘Everyone who was in the race is a suspect. We’ll never find the culprit.’

‘What do you mean “we”?’ asked April. ‘You’re the cop. This is all your problem.’

Constable Pike gritted his teeth. April was entirely right. He was in charge. It would be at least twelve hours before reinforcements from the city arrived, and when they did, the impossibility of the investigation would all be blamed on him.

‘It’s not going to look good, you running in a mud race while the bank was getting robbed,’ added April. ‘Cops have a hard enough time living down the comparison with pigs, and then you go and cover yourself in mud.’

Constable Pike felt like bursting into tears. He hadn’t thought of that. His brothers were never going to let him hear the end of this when they had their next family reunion. Maybe he should become a fugitive and go on the run too.

Then Tom piped up, ‘But I know who did it.’

Everyone stared at him in stunned silence for a moment.

‘How can you know who did it?’ asked April. ‘You saw less than anyone else. You’re vision-impaired.’

‘That’s just it,’ said Tom. ‘You’re all vision-impaired. You can’t see what you want to see because the thief was covered in mud. But I’m used to it. I don’t ever recognise people by the way they look. I have to recognise them by the sound of their voice. If I hear that voice again, I’ll recognise them.’

‘But who are the suspects?’ asked Constable Pike. ‘We can’t ask everyone in Currawong to do a line-up.’

‘Yes,’ said April sarcastically, ‘because that would be dozens and dozens of people.’

‘Eight thousand people live in Currawong,’ snapped Constable Pike. ‘Plus five thousand out-of-towners registered for the race. Plus all the people travelling with them who were there as spectators.’

‘It wasn’t a spectator,’ said the bank manager. ‘It was definitely someone covered in mud.’

‘But anyone could have rolled in a puddle of mud and joined in the race halfway through,’ said Fin.

‘Or been hit by one of your flying m-m-mud balls,’ added Joe.

‘So we’ve got fifteen thousand suspects,’ said Constable Pike.

‘That’s a very defeatist attitude, Constable,’ said Loretta. ‘I’m sure we can narrow it down. For a start, you can rule out anyone who would never allow themselves to be covered in mud. So anyone with a mud allergy, or a sense of dignity.’ Loretta smiled. She had competed and managed to come away with only a few tiny mud spatters on her trousers.

‘Only you could find a way of cheating that allowed you to stay elegant,’ grumbled April.

‘It’s all about prioritising what’s important to you,’ said Loretta.

‘It can’t be that many people,’ said Fin. ‘It has to be someone who finished the race ahead of April, because they ran out of the bank and joined the race.’

‘W-w-what if they ran the other way?’ asked Joe.

‘Then everyone would have noticed them,’ said Fin. ‘No, they came out of the bank and ran in the same direction as everyone else to blend in.’

‘And I didn’t overtake many people,’ said April. ‘Not with me dragging Mr Slowcoach, here.’

‘I’m vision-impaired,’ Tom reminded her.

‘Yeah, your eyes are impaired, not your legs,’ said April.

‘How many people finished the race ahead of April and Tom?’ asked Loretta.

‘Only twelve people,’ said Fin.

‘One of them was Constable Pike,’ observed Loretta.

‘You can’t rule him out,’ said April. ‘He’s so needy. He probably robbed the bank to give himself something to do.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ snapped Constable Pike. ‘I actually care about law and order. Who else was there?’

‘I’ve got a list,’ said Fin, taking a folded piece of paper from his pocket. ‘Maya Dharawal, Joe Peski, Loretta Viswanathan, Dimitri Popov, Sam Nash, Nigel Blumstein, Erick Mwangi, Daisy Odinsdottir …’

‘Daisy Odinsdottir was in the top twelve?!’ asked Joe, horrified that he had been that close to her and not realised. Daisy had romantically pursued Joe when he first arrived in Currawong, but there had been nothing romantic about the pursuit itself. It was more like a great white shark pursuing a sardine. Relentless and merciless.

‘Well, she was chasing behind you,’ said Loretta with a wink. ‘That would have motivated her.’

‘There you go then. Problem solved. It was Daisy,’ said April. ‘She did it. She’s ruthless enough to rob a bank. And clearly mentally unhinged enough if she’s in love with my brother.’

Joe nodded frantically in full agreement.

‘There was also Klaus Hellner …’ continued Fin.

‘Who’s that?’ asked April.

‘The chef from the Good Times Cafe,’ said Loretta.

‘Okay, I revise my position. The chef did it. He’s a psycho,’ said April. ‘He tried to throw me out once.’

‘I think that is a normal human reaction to spending time with you,’ said Tom.

‘And Ingrid Bjorg,’ concluded Fin.

‘Ingrid?’ said Joe. ‘Dad’s Ingrid?’

‘Your future stepmother,’ said Loretta with a smile. ‘She’s very athletic. I believe she was on the rowing team for Stockholm University. Or perhaps it was the wrestling team. No wait … I remember, it was both.’

‘And Brad Peddler,’ said Fin.

‘How can he enter the race if he’s the organiser?’ asked Joe.

‘It’s a lot of prize money,’ said Loretta. ‘He probably didn’t want to give it to anyone else.’

Constable Pike had jotted down this list on the back of a now muddy deposit slip. ‘All right, I’ll get them all together. Then you two can try and identify our robber.’