The Case that Foiled Fabian: Murder and Witchcraft in Rural England

On Wednesday, February 14, 1945, the body of Charles Walton was discovered beneath a willow tree in the sleepy village of Lower Quinton, his torso pinned to the ground by a pitchfork that had been viciously driven through him. Walton, a life-long resident of the town and a retired laborer, was believed by many to be a clairvoyant who could talk to birds and exercise control over animals. Indeed, with the vast majority of villagers believing that Walton's death was carried out according to ritual witchcraft, such was his unusual past, the most famous police officer in Britain, Robert Fabian (Fabian of the Yard), was promptly dispatched by Scotland Yard to help solve this increasingly peculiar and foreboding mystery. Fabian was not a man prone to superstition and he had dealt with some of the most notorious killers of his time. However, there was something in the Walton murder that proved to be unnerving. Moreover, with all the clues continuing to point towards ritual witchcraft as the modus operandi and faced by a wall of silence from the villagers, Fabian faced, for the first time in his glittering career, the daunting prospect of failure.