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The Goblet of Fire
The Goblet of Fire Read online
HARRY
POTTER
and the Goblet of Fire
J.K. ROWLING
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher
This digital edition first published by Pottermore Limited in 2012
First published in print in Great Britain in 2000 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © J.K. Rowling 2000
Cover illustrations by Claire Melinsky copyright © J.K. Rowling 2010
Harry Potter characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Ent.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78110-010-3
www.pottermore.com
by J.K. Rowling
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To Peter Rowling,
in memory of Mr Ridley
and to Susan Sladden,
who helped Harry out of his cupboard
CONTENTS
ONE
The Riddle House
TWO
The Scar
THREE
The Invitation
FOUR
Back to The Burrow
FIVE
Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes
SIX
The Portkey
SEVEN
Bagman and Crouch
EIGHT
The Quidditch World Cup
NINE
The Dark Mark
TEN
Mayhem at the Ministry
ELEVEN
Aboard the Hogwarts Express
TWELVE
The Triwizard Tournament
THIRTEEN
Mad-Eye Moody
FOURTEEN
The Unforgivable Curses
FIFTEEN
Beauxbatons and Durmstrang
SIXTEEN
The Goblet of Fire
SEVENTEEN
The Four Champions
EIGHTEEN
The Weighing of the Wands
NINETEEN
The Hungarian Horntail
TWENTY
The First Task
TWENTY-ONE
The House-Elf Liberation Front
TWENTY-TWO
The Unexpected Task
TWENTY-THREE
The Yule Ball
TWENTY-FOUR
Rita Skeeter’s Scoop
TWENTY-FIVE
The Egg and the Eye
TWENTY-SIX
The Second Task
TWENTY-SEVEN
Padfoot Returns
TWENTY-EIGHT
The Madness of Mr Crouch
TWENTY-NINE
The Dream
THIRTY
The Pensieve
THIRTY-ONE
The Third Task
THIRTY-TWO
Flesh, Blood and Bone
THIRTY-THREE
The Death Eaters
THIRTY-FOUR
Priori Incantatem
THIRTY-FIVE
Veritaserum
THIRTY-SIX
The Parting of the Ways
THIRTY-SEVEN
The Beginning
— CHAPTER ONE —
The Riddle House
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. 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 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. 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 any more. 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, and 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 even more so. All the villagers cared about was the identity of their murderer – 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 had 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 in the Riddle House grounds. 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 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 neighbouring 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 that 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