Rock N' Roll

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
By J.K. Rowling

CHAPTER ONE

The Riddle House
The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it “the Riddle House,” even though it had been many
years since the Riddle family had lived there. It stood on a hill overlooking the village, some of
its windows boarded, tiles missing from its roof, and ivy spreading unchecked over its face. Once
afine-looking manor, and easily the largest and grandest building for miles around, the Riddle
House was now damp, derelict, and unoccupied.
The Little Hagletons all agreed that the old house was “creepy.” Half a century ago, something
strange and horrible had happened there, something that the older inhabitants of the village still
liked to discuss when topics for gossip were scarce. The story had beenpicked over so many
times, and had been embroidered in so many places, that nobody was quite sure what the truth
was anymore. Every version of the tale, however, started in the same place: Fifty years before, at
daybreak on a fine summer’s morning when the Riddle House had still been well kept and
impressive, a maid had entered the drawing room to find all three Riddles dead.
The maid hadrun screaming down the hill into the village and roused as many people as she
could.
“Lying there with their eyes wide open! Cold as ice! Still in their dinner things!”
The police were summoned, and the whole of Little Hangleton had seethed with shocked
curiosity and ill-disguised excitement. Nobody wasted their breath pretending to feel very sad
about the Riddles, for they had been mostunpopular. Elderly Mr. and Mrs. Riddle had been rich,
snobbish, and rude, and their grown-up son, Tom, had been, if anything, worse. All the villagers
cared about was the identity of their murderer — for plainly, three apparently healthy people did
not all drop dead of natural causes on the same night.
The Hanged Man, the village pub, did a roaring trade that night; the whole village seemed to
haveturned out to discuss the murders. They were rewarded for leaving their firesides when the
Riddles’ cook arrived dramatically in their midst and announced to the suddenly silent pub that a
man called Frank Bryce had just been arrested.
“Frank!” cried several people. “Never!”
Frank Bryce was the Riddles’ gardener. He lived alone in a run-down cottage on the grounds of
the Riddle House. Frankhad come back from the war with a very stiff leg and a great dislike of
crowds and loud noises, and had been working for the Riddles ever since.

There was a rush to buy the cook drinks and hear more details.
“Always thought he was odd,” she told the eagerly listening villagers, after her fourth sherry.
“Unfriendly, like. I’m sure if I’ve offered him a cuppa once, I’ve offered it a hundredtimes.
Never wanted to mix, he didn’t.”
“Ah, now,” said a woman at the bar, “he had a hard war, Frank. He likes the quiet life. That’s no
reason to —”
“Who else had a key to the back door, then?” barked the cook. “There’s been a spare key
hanging in the gardener’s cottage far back as I can remember! Nobody forced the door last night!
No broken windows! All Frank had to do was creep up to thebig house while we was all
sleeping…”
The villagers exchanged dark looks.
“I always thought that he had a nasty look about him, right enough,” grunted a man at the bar.
“War turned him funny, if you ask me,” said the landlord.
“Told you I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of Frank, didn’t I, Dot?” said an excited
woman in the corner.
“Horrible temper,” said Dot, nodding fervently. “Iremember, when he was a kid…”
By the following morning, hardly anyone in Little Hangleton doubted that Frank Bryce had
killed the Riddles. But over in the neighboring town of Great Hangleton, in the dark and dingy
police station, Frank was stubbornly repeating, again and again, that he was innocent, and that
the only person he had seen near the house on the day of the Riddles’ deaths had been...