Harry Potter
and the Goblet of Fire
by
J.K. Rowling
To Peter Rowling.
In Memory of Mr. Ridley.
And to Susan Sladden.
Who Helped Harry
Out of His Cupboard.
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE
CHAPTER ONE - THE RIDDLE HOUSE
The villagers of Little Hangleron 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 a fine-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 been picked 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 had run 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 most unpopular. 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 have turned 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. Frank had 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
hundred times. 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 the big
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. "I remember, 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 a
teenage boy, a stranger, dark-haired and pale. Nobody else in the village had seen any
such boy, and the police were quite sure Frank had invented him.
Then, just when things were looking very serious for Frank, the report on the
Riddles' bodies came back and changed everything.
The police had never read an odder report. A team of doctors had examined the
bodies and had concluded that none of the Riddles had been poisoned, stabbed, shot,
strangles, suffocated, or (as far as they could tell) harmed at all. In fact (the report
continued, in a tone of unmistakable bewilderment), the Riddles all appeared to be in
perfet health -- apart from the fact that they were all dead. The doctors did note (as
though determined to find something wrong with the bodies) that each of the Riddles had
a look of terror upon his or her face -- but as the frustrated police said, whoever heard of
three people being frightened to death?
As there was no proof that the Riddles had been murdered at all, the police were
forced to let Frank go. The Riddles were buried in the Little Hangleton churchyard, and
their graves remained objects of curiosity for a while. To everyone's surprise, and amid a
cloud of suspicion, Frank Bryce returned to his cottage on the grounds of the Riddle
House.
"'S far as I'm concerned, he killed them, and I don't care what the police say," said
Dot in the Hanged Man. "And if he had any decency, he'd leave here, knowing as how we
knows he did it."
But Frank did not leave. He stayed to tend the garden for the next family who
lived in the Riddle House, and then the next -- for neither family stayed long. Perhaps it
was partly because of Frank that the new owners said there was a nasty feeling about the
place, which, in the absence of inhabitants, started to fall into disrepair.
The wealthy man who owned the Riddle House these days neither lived there nor
put it to any use; they said in the village that he kept it for "tax reasons," though nobody
was very clear what these might be. The wealthy owner continued to pay Frank to do the
gardening, however. Frank was nearing his seventy-seventh birthday now, very deaf, his
bad leg stiffer than ever, but could be seen pottering around the flower beds in fine
weather, even though the weeds were starting to creep up on him, try as he might to
suppress them.
Weeds were not the only things Frank had to contend with either. Boys from the
village made a habit of throwing stones through the windows of the Riddle House. They
rode their bicycles over the lawns Frank worked so hard to keep smooth. Once or twice,
they broke into the old house for a dare. They knew that old Frank's devotion to the
house and the grounds amounted almost to an obsession, and it amused them to see him
limping across the garden, brandishing his stick and yelling croakily at them. Frank, for
his part, believed the boys tormented him because they, like their parents and
grandparents, though him a murderer. So when Frank awoke one night in August and saw
something very odd up at the old house, he merely assumed that the boys had gone one
step further in their attempts to punish him.
It was Frank's bad leg that woke him; it was paining him worse than ever in his old
age. He got up and limped downstairs into the kitchen with the idea of refilling his hot-
water bottle to ease the stiffness in his knee. Standing at the sink, filling the kettle, he
looked up at the Riddle House and saw lights glimmering in its upper windows. Frank
knew at once what was going on. The boys had broken into the house again, and judging
by the flickering quality of the light, they had started a fire.
Frank had no telephone, in any case, he had deeply mistrusted the police ever since
they had taken him in for questioning about the Riddles' deaths. He put down the kettle at
once, hurried back upstairs as fast as his bad leg would allow, and was soon back in his
kitchen, fully dressed and removing a rusty old key from its hook by the door. He picked
up his walking stick, which was propped against the wall, and set off into the night.
The front door of the Riddle House bore no sign of being forced, nor did any of
the windows. Frank limped around to the back of the house until he reached a door
almost completely hidden by ivy, took out the old key, put it into the lock, and opened the
door noiselessly.
He let himself into the cavernous kitchen. Frank had not entered it for many years;
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