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British man has wallet returned after 35 years

Thanks to Edgar Allan Poe, that dark prince of American letters, high school students across the country have visualized what it would be like to have someone bury you alive behind a wall, brick by brick, like the unfortunate sod in The Cask of Amontillado.

Poe’s story of calculated revenge, an English class staple, has made drywall the prime suspects in many a crime caper since its 1846 publication.

Now, walls can add property theft to their long list of crimes against humanity.

As the Sun reports, Richard Lane lost his brown leather wallet back in 1978 after a squash game at a local community centre.

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The British man suspected that his wallet, which contained around £15 ($23CAD), his driver’s licence, gym and union membership cards and a payment plan for a television set, had been stolen.

He would be right. He just had no idea that the culprit was an inanimate object used to support roofs and ceilings: the perfect disguise.

It took a team of crack investigators, who had gone undercover as construction workers carrying out renovations on the gym, nearly 35 years to track down the missing billfold behind a wall on the gym’s top floor.

Though he had since moved 100 miles away to put distance between himself and the painful memories of this horrific incident, Lane told the Evesham Journal that the discovery has finally brought him some closure.

“It’s amazing, absolutely amazing that the wallet’s been found,” said the grateful 58-year-old.

“I’ve been contacted by a lot of my friends who still live in the area and my mother to let me know. It’s the only wallet I’ve ever lost. I thought that someone had ‘half-inched’ it. It looks like someone has taken about £10-15 out of it then chucked into the lift shaft to hide it,” he added.

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Considering the egregious nature of the crime, authorities skipped the trial process and immediately destroyed the guilty wall.

Though he’ll never recover the decades he and his wallet lost, the story does have one more happy outcome: Lane can finally finish that payment plan for his 1978 TV set.