How to ruin a good story

Buried within the pages of this book there lies an extraordinary story worth the telling, the bald facts of which require none of the elaboration to which they are here subjected.

In 1896 a certain Anna Maria Druce, of 68 Baker Street in London, petitioned the home secretary to have her late husband’s coffin opened, on the grounds that his funeral in 1864 had been a purposeful sham devoted to ceremonial disposal of an empty box. Mr Druce had not died at all; he had simply wanted to revert to his other identity as the 5th Duke of Portland, of Welbeck Abbey near Worksop. The duke had grown tired of leading a double life and needed to kill off ‘Mr Druce’, the alias he had assumed when running the Baker Street Bazaar, so that he could concentrate his formidable, if fanciful, energies on important construction work at Welbeck which required his continuous presence.