Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [91]
Ellis picked up the phone and called Goudsmid. She sounded angry and upset, “a woman scorned,” as he would later recall his initial reaction. He made plans to meet her at Hampstead station, and then he made another call, one that was almost second nature.
Ellis depended on detectives from the other units to help the Art Squad when it was swamped, and the most reliable and talented of these outside resources was Detective Sergeant Jonathan Searle, a Cambridge-educated art historian who worked at Special Branch, the muscle behind British intelligence on national security and espionage.
Searle was as skilled at spotting fakes as he was at grilling thugs. When Ellis told him he was interviewing a possible witness to a daring and complicated art crime, Searle was all ears. Could he put everything aside and come down to the Hampstead precinct? Ellis asked. He just wanted Searle’s gut reaction. He didn’t say much else, and Searle didn’t ask.
Through the glass partition, Detective Sergeant Searle observed the woman in the interrogation room. She was slight, almost bird-like, and appeared to be extremely harassed, demure one moment and raging the next. She stared at the floor, then at the wall. When he went inside, she refused to look him in the eye. When he began asking pointed questions, her expression conveyed barely restrained anger when she mentioned Drewe. In anguished, staccato bursts, she retailed old grudges and stories of criminal activity on the part of her former common-law husband. Most of what she said was irrelevant to the reason for Searle’s visit, but he thought some of it might be useful.
Goudsmid described Drewe as a clever manipulator who was running a profitable forgery business in oil paintings and was likely involved in other crimes. She said she could prove it.
“He’s having you all on,” she added. “He’s a murderer, and you’re letting him get away.” She added that he took her children and her money, too.
During nearly twenty-five years with Special Branch Searle had had occasion to question all manner of villains. His unit, originally called the Special Irish Branch, had been established in the late 1800s to fight Irish nationalists, but it had expanded over time. It had spied on Lenin, guarded Churchill, interrogated cold war spies, and protected IRA targets. Searle could usually tell when someone was trying to put something over on him. Goudsmid was obviously angry, but he didn’t think she was lying, although the murder accusation did seem a bit extreme. He would have to ask Ellis about it. Meanwhile, he guided her back to her story gently.
Recently, she said, she had been getting angry calls from Drewe’s clients, complaining about fake paintings and saying that they wanted their money back. She had been cleaning out her attic when she found bags filled with incriminating papers belonging to Drewe. Most of them had to do with art, but a few were more personal. Among them were old pay slips from an Orthodox Jewish school near Golders Green where Drewe had taught physics in the early 1980s—the same years, he had told Goudsmid, that he was a military consultant. There was also a three-page letter he had written to the police, explaining why he had fired a gun in the school’s playground. (He claimed he was conducting a physics experiment that “incorporated ballistics to study the motion of projectiles using both electronic timing, and more advanced stroboscopic methods.”) Soon after the incident, he was fired from the school, though he was never charged. Goudsmid had also found documents indicating that Drewe resigned from teaching physics at another school after his academic credentials were challenged by a colleague.
“For twenty years he called himself doctor or professor. He never even made it past [high school]! Everything he has ever told me is a