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By Root 541 0

Hill had asked him to stand by to play the role of an art expert, and Searle was ready with his kit, a little briefcase with a jeweler’s loupe, a couple of small paintbrushes, a ruler, and a paint scraper. At the last minute Searle was told that he wouldn’t be needed, but the episode stuck in his mind. Now he wondered whether Drewe had simply been toying with the cops or whether he had been trying to ingratiate himself in the event that his forgeries came to light. Usually informants worked with the police for money, only rarely to cover their tracks. That took a much more sophisticated kind of criminal. Ellis, pressed for time on the tomb-raider case, handed the John Drewe case over to Searle.

“I can’t do both,” Ellis told Searle. “It’s yours.”

Searle unloaded the contents of Goudsmid’s bags onto his desk. Some of the documents spilled onto the floor. There were hundreds of them: photographs and transparencies; mock-ups for exhibition catalogs; receipts from galleries dating from as early as the 1950s; a letter from the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and another from the critic and onetime ICA director Roland Penrose. Someone with good taste and a sense of art history had put together a nice little traveling museum. Still, it was unclear whether the stuff was stolen, forged, or both.

For the next several days Searle sat at a spare desk in the Art Squad office and went through the material. It was like using kitchen mitts on a jigsaw puzzle without a clear picture of the final image. He read each receipt and handwritten note, analyzed photographs and catalogs, and sorted the evidence onto piles on the desk and on the floor. There were more than four dozen artists represented, and each got his own pile.

Once Searle had assigned every last scrap of paper to one or another artist, he broke the piles down by individual paintings. He looked for clear links to specific collectors, middlemen, galleries, and catalog entries, then recorded each name on a cheat sheet that soon resembled a genealogical tree gone haywire.

Some works appeared to have two or three entirely different provenances; others had none at all. Some had cryptic reference numbers. Some provenances stopped in the late 1950s; others corresponded to pieces that had recently been sold at auction. There were an infinite number of possible arrangements. Old letters from former ICA directors had been cut and pasted to form new ones whose meanings had been subtly altered, often to include the title of a new piece. Dozens of catalogs had their illustrations clipped out. There were enigmatic handwritten notes, presumably penned by Drewe. One read, “Change color. Does this ink change color from intense blue to black? Yes it does. YES! Print photograph Giacometti, Nicholson, Bissiere.” Another note referred to a work by Ben Nicholson: “Look at Nicholson in sales ledger . . . sent back. Unsold.” A third was a list of fourteen works purportedly painted by Giacometti. Next to three of the entries was the notation “have last three columns in the same ink.” Searle found photographs of those fourteen works in the bags of evidence: Each had been photocopied onto a separate sheet of paper above a typed description of the work’s title, dimensions, and owner.

Searle wasn’t sure what was genuine and what was forged. A letter on 1950s-era paper might have been real but could just as well have been typed onto antique paper forty years later. There were letters to dealers and art experts signed by John Drewe and John Cockett, by Peter Harris and H. R. Stoakes, by Clive Belman and Danny Berger.

Searle knew that Drewe and Cockett were one and the same. Among Goudsmid’s documents was a copy of John Richard Drewe’s birth certificate. He was born in 1948 to Kathleen Beryl Barrington-Drew and Basil Alfred Richard Cockett, a telephone engineer and the son of a police officer. Long after his parents divorced, the young Cockett officially adopted his mother’s maiden name, adding the final “e” when he was twenty-one years old. According to British records, Drewe’s father remarried in 1959