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The next day she told Searle about her visit to Sotheby’s. The nude was back in play, she said. Apparently Bartos had been unable to sell it privately, so he had put it up for auction.

When Bartos discovered that Sotheby’s had nixed his Standing Nude, he knew Palmer was to blame. After all his exertions, he wasn’t about to give up on the piece, which experts had assured him was authentic. He called Stuart Berkeley, who had originally shopped the piece, and told him he was coming to London. He wanted to see Berkeley and his investigators from Art Research Associates before meeting with Palmer at the archives.

“This problem is as much yours as it is mine,” he told Berkeley.

Then he left a message on Palmer’s answering machine saying that he stood by the piece and was flying in to prove its authenticity. Could they meet at the Victoria and Albert and go from there to the Tate? He had hired an art research firm that could guide them through the evidence: Once she saw it, he was sure she would be convinced, and they could settle the matter once and for all.

As soon as Palmer heard Bartos’s message she called Detective Searle. “What should I do?” she asked. “Should I meet him?”

“Stall him a few more days,” Searle said. “I need a little more time.”

Searle took the forged O’Hana catalog Palmer had given him—“Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Stage Designs with Contributions from Members of the Entertainment World”—and showed it to Wendy Fish at the V&A. The catalog contained an illustration of Bartos’s Standing Nude, 1955 and had the V&A emblem neatly stamped on the front cover.

Fish found a bound volume of original O’Hana catalogs and handed it to Searle. Requisition slips indicated that Drewe had consulted the volume frequently, which consisted of a dozen catalogs in chronological order from 1954 to 1962. One of them looked identical to Palmer’s “Entertainment World” catalog.

The publication was made from folded sheets of paper stapled down the middle and glued to a larger folded sheet of coarse brown paper serving as a cover. This brown paper had a black, red, and blue picture on the front, and had been sewn into the binding of the volume. It appeared to be part of the original catalog. Unlike the other catalogs in the volume, which were slightly different in size but flush at the top, “Entertainment World” was off-kilter. Searle looked at its bottom edge. Trapped in the stitching between the two brown paper leaves were small fragments of paper. He guessed that these too were probably pieces of the original catalog.

Searle asked to borrow the bound volume, and took it to Adam Craske, the Yard’s in-house document expert. Craske confirmed his suspicions. All the other catalogs had been printed in the 1950s with an antiquated letterpress system, but “Entertainment World” had been printed with the modern chemical process of lithography. And all the other catalogs had been stamped in ink, with a red or purple impression of a crown over an oval containing the words “Victoria and Albert Museum Library,” but the stamp on “Entertainment World” had been made with a copy machine whose toner dated to the mid-1970s. Craske said he had found similar discrepancies in the Hanover catalogs.

When Searle returned the volume to the V&A library, Wendy Fish stopped him at the door. She showed him another bound volume of O’Hana catalogs that was identical to the one Searle held in his hand—or almost identical. She opened it to a catalog entitled “Painting by Stars of the Entertainment World.” This had to be the original. The volume had been at the restorer’s and therefore could not have been tampered with.

Drewe’s mistake could be a significant plus for the prosecution.

Back at the Yard, Searle and Volpe hammered out a strategy. They called the city’s most prestigious dealers and curators and asked them to be on the lookout for Drewe’s fakes, and for his cohorts, if they showed up at any of the archives.

Within days they received a call