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.
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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
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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,
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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;
nevertheless, although it was very dark, he remembered where the door into the
hall was, and he groped his way towards it, his nostrils full of the smell of decay,
ears pricked for any sound of footsteps or voices from overhead. He reached the
hall, which was a little lighter owing to the large mullioned windows on either side
of the front door, and started to climb the stairs, blessing the dust that lay thick
upon the stone, because it muffled the sound of his feet and stick.
On the landing, Frank turned right, and saw at once where the intruders were: At
the every end of the passage a door stood ajar, and a flickering light shone through
the gap, casting a long sliver of gold across the black floor. Frank edged closer and
closer, he was able to see a narrow slice of the room beyond.
The fire, he now saw, had been lit in the grate. This surprised him. Then he
stopped moving and listened intently, for a man's voice spoke within the room; it
sounded timid and fearful.
"There is a little more in the bottle, My Lord, if you are still hungry."
"Later," said a second voice. This too belonged to a man -- but it was strangely
high-pitched, and cold as a sudden blast of icy wind. Something about that voice
made the sparse hairs on the back of Frank's neck stand up. "Move me closer to
the fire, Wormtail."
Frank turned his right ear toward the door, the better to hear. There came the clink
of a bottle being put down upon some hard surface, and then the dull scraping
noise of a heavy chair being dragged 