Ellis also filled Searle in on the recent stream of phone calls from suspicious art dealers and Tate curators. He had concluded that Drewe was a master manipulator who had gotten one over on the hallowed museum. “When you give an art archive £20,000, they give you the key to the door,” he said.

Finally, Ellis told Searle that Drewe was already a familiar figure to the Art Squad. He had first surfaced a year earlier, when he called the Yard with inside information on a number of paintings he said had been stolen by the Mafia and were stored at a Hampstead restaurant called the Macaroni. He invited the police to meet him at the Battersea heliport to discuss the matter, and specifically requested the presence of Charley Hill, then head of the Art Squad. Hill, who had been described by one reporter as a “solid presence and deliberately unmemorable—like Alec Guinness,” was something of a celebrity. A gifted impersonator and mimic with a specialty in Mid-Atlantic accents, he had helped to recover The Scream by posing as an American art expert.

At the appointed time, Hill and a colleague waited at the heliport and watched as Drewe landed in a top-of-the-line Bell Jet Ranger and emerged with his two children. The heliport staff seemed to know him well and ushered the group into a conference room.

Drewe introduced himself as a scientist with twin passions, physics and the arts. He seemed bright, articulate, and engaging. Hill was impressed, but he couldn’t shake the sight of the two unhappy-looking children sitting quietly in the back of the room.

Drewe launched into the Macaroni story. He said he was having dinner at the restaurant when he overheard the owner talking about a group of stolen artworks he had recently acquired. Drewe took the owner aside and told him he was an art dealer who was always looking for interesting work—if the price was right. The owner showed him several pieces, and Drewe said he might be able to fence them.

Charley Hill listened.

Drewe reached into his briefcase and handed him photographs of two paintings, one by the presurrealist Giorgio de Chirico, the other by his contemporary Filippo de Pisis.

The professor had a proposition: He would set up a sting operation at the restaurant if Charley Hill would pose as his buyer.

The detective was skeptical. What was Drewe doing in an alleged Mafia-connected hangout in the first place?

The professor leaned over and lowered his voice. “I’m a sayan,” he said, and explained that sayanim were Israeli sleeper agents living in-conspicuously in cities around the world. If the Jewish state’s secret service needed practical support for an assignment, the volunteer sayan network was there. For example, if a sayan worked for a rental car agency, he might provide a vehicle to a Mossad agent without asking for documentation. Similarly, a real estate agent might secure a strategically located apartment, or a doctor might treat a gunshot wound without reporting it to the authorities.

Drewe said that he had worked as an aerospace designer at a secret Israeli installation, and that the Mossad had asked him to help recover blueprints for the Stealth helicopter, documents that had been stolen by the self-same Macaroni restaurateur and his Mafia cohorts, who were planning to sell them to Arab countries.

Quite a yarn, Hill thought. He told Drewe he would be in touch.

Hill’s men discovered in their files that Drewe had also called in another tip: He had denounced a right-wing group that was circulating anti-Semitic “Chanukah cards,” which was potentially a hate crime. Drewe’s lead was under investigation by the Organised Crime Unit.

Hill doubted Drewe’s story about his Mossad connections, but it was his habit to cultivate and run informants, and even an eccentric stoolie like Drewe could be useful. Hill had worked with far more unusual informants in the past. He decided to go ahead with the operation and asked Drewe to set up a meeting with the restaurateur. The professor offered his Mossad contacts to help with surveillance. Hill declined.

On the day of the meeting, with his team in place outside the restaurant, Hill walked into the Macaroni wearing a suit and bow tie. Drewe introduced him to the owner as an American dealer with a reputation for discretion and an elastic sense of ethics.

The sting was in play.

They ate scallops and linguine while Drewe boasted about his extensive art collection and his past donations to the Tate. Hill noted that Drewe was laying it on thick, fluffing his feathers about his “great eye” for art. Then the owner took Hill aside and led him into his private office, where he began pulling artworks from the safe. Hill recognized the stolen de Chirico and the de Pisis. There were other works too, including a dreadful “Dalí” statuette of a woman that seemed sculpted from resin and gilt. Hill said he was interested and would arrange for his restorer to return the following day with £50,000 in cash.

The next day the police moved in and arrested the proprietor. The de Chirico was returned to its owner, but the other works turned out to be fakes. The restaurateur was charged with fraud and then released on bail. When the case finally went to trial, the restaurateur’s lawyers argued that their client was just a hardworking immigrant who had been set up by John Drewe. On the stand, Hill’s star witness—Drewe—became a liability. The case crumbled, and the jury found the restaurateur innocent of all charges.

Drewe disappeared from the radar.

At the time Charley Hill could not begin to understand the professor’s motivation. Years later, when Drewe’s con artistry had been fully revealed, Hill realized the extent to which he’d been taken in.

“I frankly made a mistake,” he recalled. “I was full of arrogance and self-worth after I recovered the Munch. I had been on the news and in the papers, and Drewe had obviously seen them all. He had me over completely.”

Searle vaguely recalled the Macaroni case. 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.”

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 and died in 1982.

Some of the more inscrutable documents had nothing to do with the art world. For example, there were letters to Drewe from the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department and from the commander of the Royal Navy, written on behalf of the Prince of Wales. In addition, there were receipts made out to Drewe for bugging equipment and an electronic voice-changer.

A picture was beginning to emerge of a detailed scheme to fake provenances for what Searle had to assume were fake paintings. The letters and receipts went far toward establishing the lineage of these works, but Drewe had gone further: He had somehow come up with shipping, customs, and insurance forms, as well as various reports from restorers, including one from a venerable third-generation business in London. Some of these were undoubtedly phony, but many of the letters, receipts, and catalogs bore stamps from the Tate, the V&A, and other British art institutions. Searle was sure these genuine documents had been stolen.

Having spent years around painters and restorers, Searle knew that the investigation would take months. While all fingers pointed to Drewe as the culprit, there must be others involved, but were they knowing participants or innocent bystanders? Was Drewe forging the works himself, along with the provenances, or did he have an accomplice?

Searle called Goudsmid, his only witness, and asked her about some of the names he had found in the two black plastic bags. She told him that Clive Belman was her neighbor and Danny Berger was a friend who had lost money buying paintings from Drewe. She said Berger wanted to talk to the police but was afraid of Drewe.

What about Peter Harris and Daniel Stoakes?

Goudsmid had never met either.

Who had painted the pictures?

Goudsmid could not say for sure.

“Who brought the paintings to the house?” Searle asked.

“Drewe did.”

“Did they look finished?”

Goudsmid couldn’t tell. Some had come in without a signature. She remembered that Drewe had a book containing the signatures of famous artists and kept it handy.

Had she ever seen him putting a signature on a painting?

No, but she had once seen one of Drewe’s friends correcting or re-coloring a Nicholson painting. “I remember it very well,” she said. “He used a lot of grays.” This retouch man had visited them often, early on. Drewe had introduced him to her as an art historian and adviser to his art collection.

Searle’s ears pricked up. “Batsheva,” he said impatiently, “if you were introduced to this man you must know his name.”

“John Myatt,” she said.