In the closing months of the Second World War, an old hedger was found bludgeoned and hacked to death in a Warwickshire field. His name was Charles Walton and the place was the little village of Lower Quinton, under the shadow of Meon Hill. They called in the local CID; they called in Scotland Yard; they interviewed hundreds of people; they asked thousands of questions. But somebody wasn't talking. The whole village was silent, as if someone had drawn down a blind. After the case was scaled down, the rumours remained. Was Meon Hill the centre of a witches' coven? And was old Charlie Walton, with his ability to talk to birds and toads and his magic watch, a witch himself? For eighty years, the supernatural has hovered over the murder of Charles Walton, with vague, haunted memories of secret rites and black dogs. Even the dead man's grave has vanished. Rumour has been piled on innuendo, adding to the excesses of writers determined to make a supernatural mystery out of a very local tragedy, until the dead man himself has disappeared into a morass of hocus pocus. This is the first book to get past the nonsense, accessing original police files that say precisely nothing about witchcraft. Analysing the facts from the time and removing the ever-more ludicrous layers of fiction, it gets as near to solving the mystery as we are ever likely to.

M J Trow is the author of nearly 100 books covering crime fiction, true crime and historical biography. He is a military historian by training, lectures extensively in the UK and overseas and has appeared regularly on the History and Discovery Channels. He lives in the Isle of Wight.