"J. K. Rowling - The Goblet of Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowling J. K)

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