Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [96]
At 6:30, he got up to wake the kids, but before he had a chance to put on his trousers, he heard a knock on the door. He dressed quickly and ran downstairs. On the doorstep stood a well-dressed man with trim blond hair. He introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Jonathan Searle and said he had a warrant to search the house for forgeries. Without a word of protest Myatt let Searle in, along with the three officers behind him. Four more officers were stationed in front of the house.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Myatt said.
Searle thought he looked almost relieved to see them.
Myatt’s son came down to see what all the noise was about, and Myatt spoke to him gently. “They’re just doing a survey of the house, dear,” he said. Then he took Searle aside and asked him for a favor.
“The school bus will be here in an hour. Would you mind waiting until the children have left? Carry on with what you’re doing, but I’d rather not speak to you until they’re on the bus.”
Searle shot a look to his partner, Bob Rizzo, a detective constable on the Art Squad.
“We’re mob-handed [too much muscle] on this one,” Rizzo whispered out of earshot, believing that Myatt was not likely to give them any trouble.
Searle agreed and dismissed the other officers. “Go back to Stafford and have a decent breakfast,” he told them.
When Myatt’s daughter came down, everyone went into the kitchen. Myatt made breakfast for the children and tea for the detectives. Searle noticed a sketch of one of the kids on the refrigerator door. It was covered with memos and phone numbers.
“That’s a beautiful drawing,” he said. “Did you do it?”
Myatt nodded.
The man was more than capable of churning out high-quality forgeries, Searle thought. What a waste of talent.
When the school bus arrived, Myatt took the children out and waved good-bye to them. Then he went inside, cadged a cigarette, and watched as the detectives went to work tagging and bagging stacks of drawings, notebooks, and expensive art books. Certain pages had been turned down in the books, and Searle suspected those were the works whose style Drewe had asked Myatt to forge. One rare volume was on Sutherland’s work for the Coventry Cathedral tapestry, and Searle recalled the sketches he’d seen in Goudsmid’s bags. When he opened a book on Giacometti, a piece of paper fell out. On it, someone had been practicing the artist’s signature.
There were dozens of artworks around the house, including a Giacometti of a man and a tree in a grand arbor and several Russian-style ink sketches. In a briefcase Searle found a marginally exculpatory letter that Myatt had written to Drewe saying he wanted out.
“What else have you got?” he asked Myatt.
“You didn’t check the attic,” Myatt answered.
The detectives continued their search, and by the time they were done they had collected some fifty books, sketches, and letters.
Searle asked Myatt if he wanted to call a solicitor. Myatt declined. When Searle told him that he was suspected of conspiring to forge works of art, Myatt shrugged.
“Well, that’s it then.”
They put him in the back of a squad car and drove him ten miles to the Stafford station house, where Searle and Rizzo sat him down and asked him how he had met Drewe. Myatt told them about the ad in Private Eye.
“I’m not in touch with Professor Drewe anymore,” he said. “He’s dangerous and volatile.”
Myatt kept referring to Drewe as “professor,” and Searle assured him that he was not. Drewe’s education was limited to an undistinguished stint in grammar school.
Myatt was surprised. He had always assumed that there was at least a kernel of truth in Drewe’s account of himself as a physicist.
Searle said he wanted Myatt back tomorrow but for now the interview was over.
Riding home in the police car, Myatt wished he could float off like the angel in Corot