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.įrank Bryce was the Riddles' gardener. The Hanged Man, the village pub, did a roaring trade that night the whole village seemed to have turned out to discuss the murders. 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. Riddle had been rich, snobbish, and rude, and their grown-up son, Tom, had been, if anything, worse. Nobody wasted their breath pretending to feel very sad about the Riddles, for they had been most unpopular. The police were summoned, and the whole of Little Hangleton had seethed with shocked curiosity and ill-disguised excitement. "Lying there with their eyes wide open! Cold as ice! Still in their dinner things!" The maid had run screaming down the hill into the village and roused as many people as she could. 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 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. The Little Hangletons 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. Once a fine-looking manor, and easily the largest and grandest building for miles around, the Riddle House was now damp, derelict, and unoccupied. 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. WarnerBros.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.
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