In third-year halls, their paths first crossed,
A Raven boy, a Blonde girl lost.
"Stay out of my way," she warned with a glare,
But something lingered in the frosty air.
Crimson with his scar and fame,
Emerald with her secrets untamed.
Two worlds ap...
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The Riddle House
The villagers of Little Hangleron still called it "the Riddle House," even though ithad been many years since the Riddle family had lived there. It stood on a hilloverlooking 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 easilythe largest and grandest building for miles around, the Riddle House was nowdamp, derelict, and unoccupied.
The Little Hagletons all agreed that the old house was "creepy." Half a centuryago, something strange and horrible had happened there, something that the olderinhabitants 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 somany places, that nobody was quite sure what the truth was anymore.
Everyversion 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 withshocked curiosity and ill-disguised excitement. Nobody wasted their breathpretending 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-upson, Tom, had been, if anything, worse. All the villagers cared about was theidentity of their murderer -- for plainly, three apparently healthy people did not alldrop dead of natural causes on the same night.The Hanged Man, the village pub, did a roaring trade that night; the whole villageseemed to have turned out to discuss the murders.
They were rewarded for leavingtheir firesides when the Riddles' cook arrived dramatically in their midst andannounced to the suddenly silent pub that a man called Frank Bryce had just beenarrested."Frank!" cried several people. "Never!"Frank Bryce was the Riddles' gardener. He lived alone in a run-down cottage onthe grounds of the Riddle House. Frank had come back from the war with a verystiff leg and a great dislike of crowds and loud noises, and had been working forthe 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 herfourth sherry.
"Unfriendly, like. I'm sure if I've offered him a cuppa once, I'veoffered 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 quietlife. That's no reason to --"
"Who else had a key to the back door, then?" barked the cook. "There's been aspare key hanging in the gardener's cottage far back as I can remember! Nobodyforced the door last night! No broken windows! All Frank had to do was creep upto the big house while we was all sleeping..."
