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“I’m doing the ICA a favor getting all this stuff out of there,” he told Myatt, explaining that the documents had been left to rot in boxes in an unventilated room. Now he had saved them.

The weak afternoon light was fading. It was time for Myatt to return to Staffordshire and pick the children up from the babysitter. First he and Drewe would have to decide which of the artists to focus on next.

Myatt wanted a break from Giacometti and Bissière, and once they had gone through the ICA material again they decided to give Ben Nicholson a shot. Myatt knew his work well, having seen dozens of his still lifes and geometrical landscapes. There was a gallery not far from his home that specialized in Nicholson, and he could study the painter’s technique there, at his leisure. He had always thought of Nicholson’s work as clear, bright, and not terribly intricate, so the job would require scant emotional involvement, unlike the Giacomettis. He could probably whip out a Nicholson in an afternoon.

As Myatt was leaving, Drewe pulled out one of the original ICA documents, a letter from Picasso to the photographer and journalist Lee Miller, an American beauty who had been on the cover of Vogue before becoming a war photographer and chronicler of the surrealists. Drewe put the letter on the table next to a copy of a magazine cover shot of Miller and asked Myatt to draw a quick sketch of her next to Picasso’s signature. With a few bold strokes, Myatt captured Miller’s dark eyebrows and her slightly mournful gaze. He had just upped the value of the letter by several thousand pounds.

Myatt capped his pen and walked out the door.

Drewe was spending a lot of time at his mother’s home in Burgess Hill in Sussex. He had always been close to her, and she in turn apparently regarded him as her golden boy who could do no wrong. For the last few months he’d been using her house as his own private office, a mail drop for his various aliases and front companies.

Today he sat down at an old manual typewriter and began to type out a letter from “John Cockett, director of Cybernetic Systems International Inc.,” to the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the letter, “Cockett” vouched for John Drewe, who had applied the week before for a reader’s ticket to the library’s special collections archive, which contained the records of nearly every major British art gallery from the 1940s and 1950s, including correspondence, catalogs, and sales ledgers.

“I have known Dr. Drewe since 1974, when he participated in a series of programs on BBC Television,” he wrote. He went on to praise Drewe as a physicist “who has undertaken some outstanding experimental research in electromagnetism.”

Cockett claimed to have served as a character reference for Drewe once before, when Drewe asked to examine some private documents relating to Nicolas de Staël. “I understand that the correspondence is of great interest to art historians because it gives an insight into the artist’s problems during the years immediately before his suicide.” Here Drewe was displaying his expertise in the con man’s traditional diversionary tactic of changing the subject and deflecting attention from the original question.

Finally, and most conclusively, Cockett called Drewe “a man of integrity and ability who will show the appropriate consideration when handling your valuable material.”

Drewe posted the letter to the V&A and waited for his reader’s ticket.

Then he got in touch with the Tate. An idea had begun to take shape, one that would turn his scheme into an art fraud on a much grander scale, and the Tate was key. If at that moment Drewe had thought about the history of the venerable museum, he would have smiled. The irony was not lost on him that the Tate sat on the site of what had once been one of Europe’s grimmest prisons, Millbank Penitentiary, a gloomy Dickensian cesspit with a three-mile-long maze of passages. The convicts had been forced to serve their sentences making shoes and mailbags in silence. If