Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [77]
He also told her he had inherited a dozen guns from his father and kept them in the attic. Once, at a particularly low point in their relationship, he brought a few of them down and polished them in front of her.
Around this time Drewe made a surprising confession: Some of his paintings had come from Catch’s German-born brother, a former director at I. G. Farben, the notorious German chemical company that made poison gas for the Nazi death chambers. The brother had been given the paintings in recognition of his services to the Third Reich. Goudsmid was shocked and disgusted, and in late 1993 she told Drewe she’d had enough. She’d been offered a job in the United States and was moving to California. The children would be going with her.
Not long afterward, Drewe emptied their joint account and moved out. He called her supervisors at the hospital and told them she was abusing the children. He circulated the notion that she was suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and she was temporarily suspended from her job. Family court forbade her from making contact with her children, but she fought the court order and was eventually allowed visitation rights with the children. She was certain that Drewe had brainwashed the kids and lied to them in order to keep them away from her. Now he was after the house, and she feared she would soon be homeless.
Higgs’s investigation became a lifeline: If she could get Drewe behind bars, family court would listen to her and give her children back. She had no doubt that Drewe had set fire to the house on Lowfield Road, and that he was capable of murder. In the past he’d hinted darkly at his work with Britain’s intelligence services, and claimed to have loaned the Crown his expertise in defensive weaponry and traveled abroad on behalf of the foreign service.
When Goudsmid threatened to go to the police and tell them about his art scam, Drewe said it was useless. He’d been promoted to the post of chief director of the powerful MI-10—an agency that was set up during World War II for weapons and technical analysis—and no one would believe her.
Furthermore, Goudsmid claimed, he had identified her as a Mossad agent to a group of London-based Islamic militants.
“You’d better leave the country in the next ten days or I cannot vouch for your safety,” Goudsmid recalled Drewe telling her. “It’s much more dangerous than you can imagine. It’s out of my hands now.”24
In the following days Goudsmid received a number of threatening phone calls, her telephone line was cut off several times, and she was sure she was being followed. Fearing for her life, she sat down and wrote a long, rambling letter to the police commissioner on the subject of the “MI-10 Director.”
“I am worried for my well-being,” she said. “I ask you to conduct an investigation about this & the fact that a man who has been elevated to such a high & powerful position . . . is able to terrorize so many people.”
The commissioner did not reply. To him, Goudsmid had probably come across as deranged. MI-10 had been defunct for at least thirty years.
Walking along the main thoroughfare of Golders Green one day, alone and frightened, she stopped dead in front of Lindy’s, a popular East European eatery across the street from the tube station. Through the window she could see Drewe and the kids. She felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. With nothing left to lose, she went inside and began screaming at him. Drewe grabbed the children and stormed out in such a hurry that he left his briefcase behind. Goudsmid opened it, glanced inside, and took the short walk to the Hampstead police station a few blocks away.
Higgs was at his desk.
“Please look through this,” she begged. “It’s all the proof you’ll ever need.”
Inside the briefcase Higgs found a glue stick, a pair of scissors,