Provenance

The idea of concocting the intricate history of a work of art from whole cloth was no great leap for Drewe, who had been inventing and reinventing himself since he was a child. By the time he was a nervous thirteen-year-old thread of a boy in short trousers and cap, he had mastered the art of dissembling. He boasted that he was a descendant of the earl of York though he had in fact grown up in a lower-middle-class home in southeast England, the stepson of a coal merchant. He was quiet and circumspect, with anxious eyes behind thin spectacles. He had a scar running from his chin to his neck, and this was a sore point: He told the other boys that he’d been accidentally scalded by boiling water. (Later, he would claim that he had been wounded in battle.) He was clearly an intellectual, above the norm. He had few friends, and it seemed he liked it that way. He was never bullied. Even in those tender years, from thirteen to fifteen, he was withdrawn. There was a controlled grief about him that made the other children keep their distance.

In the summer, he and his only real friend, Hugh Roderick Stoakes, would play long games of whist, an early version of bridge. Drewe (still John Cockett at the time) would deliver speeches to an imaginary audience and tell Stoakes that the two of them were fated to be “heroes for the future.” They rarely talked about girls or football or pop music. They preferred to listen to the funeral march from the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica, imagining the mourners’ silhouettes against a darkening sky. They traded horror paperbacks, and Drewe kept his collection next to his advanced chemistry and physics tomes and his copies of Conrad, Kafka, and Joyce. His room was clean and neat, with reams of paper stacked next to a typewriter on which he composed complex mathematical equations and theories.

Even as a boy, Drewe was drawn to the rigors of science. He loved the precision and control and discipline of scientific endeavor. His math skills were sophisticated, and he could assimilate information quickly and accurately. By his early teens he was reading up on quantum mechanics and cold fusion. He plumbed the philosophy of science and pored over Vogel’s Textbook of Practical Organic Chemistry, a university-level text. Stoakes suspected that his friend was uncomfortable with purely conceptual matters, but he could see that Drewe was able to devour buckets of hard facts, and was quick to pick up the gist of an argument. He had a pigeonhole mind, an uncanny ability to locate and isolate relevant data from massive amounts of information.

In their late teens Drewe would pour tea for his friend from a Georgian pot when he visited, and they would chat for hours about physics, ballistics, and weaponry. He showed Stoakes a yellowing document that illustrated how to build a homemade nuclear bomb, and they discussed Einstein’s unified field theory. He was quiet and reticent until they talked science, and then he would go on for hours. Hard science provided a necessary jolt, he said, a rush of sheer intellectual joy. It was his calling. He was determined to be a pioneer, to crash through boundaries. He gave Stoakes a paper he had written that appeared to break clear of the fundamental laws of physics. Stoakes thought it read like science fiction.

The boys enjoyed an extended adolescence. Sometimes Drewe pretended to listen, but Stoakes could tell he was somewhere else. Occasionally he would short-circuit. Stoakes remembered these moments with absolute clarity, because Drewe’s temper tantrums could be terrifying, like thunderclaps. The softness would vanish as though it had never been there, his face would contort, and he would speak in staccato bursts through gritted teeth.

Drewe did reasonably well at school and got through his ordinary level exams, the earlier and less rigorous of two standardized tests in secondary school subjects, but he seemed to have little patience for his teachers, who seemed increasingly resistant to his obvious talent. His family expected him to become a lawyer or a professor, but he was determined to make his own way in the world. He’d had his fill of academia and wanted to run his own ship without middlemen or explanations. When he turned seventeen, he took an internship at the Atomic Energy Authority, a clerical position that he must have felt was beneath him. His boss was one John Catch, and he had an enormous impact on Drewe. Catch would remember him as a “very clever” young man who had an impressive knowledge of advanced physics, even though tests showed he hardly understood the basics. Catch encouraged him to take college-prep classes through the AEA’s part-time study program, but Drewe dropped out, claiming that he already knew the material.

Finally, at the age of nineteen, he resigned from the AEA, changed his name, and disappeared without a trace. When he resurfaced some fifteen years later, he had mysteriously acquired a PhD and claimed he was a well-paid nuclear physicist who did consulting work on high-level technology. At various times, he also claimed to have been a professor, a historian specializing in the Nazi era, a consultant for the Ministry of Defence, an army lieutenant, a weapons expert, and in his off-hours, an expert hang glider.

Drewe’s life during those fifteen years remains a mystery. Although Stoakes did see Drewe a few times during that period, he had for the most part fallen out of touch with his friend—which didn’t seem to affect Drewe much. Drewe would make use of Stoakes’s name regularly in his con.

There is no official record of Drewe until shortly before he and Goudsmid set up house in Golders Green, where he soon found a ready audience for his tales at one of his favorite pubs, the Catch-22. Located across the street from the Golders Green police precinct headquarters, the pub was named after the quintessential antiwar novel, but it had become a second home to an assortment of military types, a watering hole for army buffs, uniform aficionados, private bodyguards, veterans of the Special Forces, and off-duty detectives. The Catch was run by an easygoing ex-paramilitary man. Regimental ties hung from the wall behind the bar, along with various battle emblems and group photos of soldiers. In the muddy Guinness light, with Queen and Elvis on the jukebox, the regulars traded war stories and argued about rugby, cars, and politics.

One spring evening not long after his visit to the gallery with Myatt to inspect the Bissière, Drewe stepped out of his house in his blue overcoat, briefcase in hand, and turned onto Finchley Road, past Danny Berger’s garage, on his way to the Catch. He looked like any other well-dressed businessman heading for a pint after work. In fact, he was still at work. He was always at work, always on the lookout for a new “legend,” a cover he could use for his game, a thread he could weave into one of his stories. It was part of the con man’s job, and Drewe was a patient sort. If tonight he came across someone whose name or story he could sew into the quilt, all the better.

At the pub, Drewe was greeted by several of his mates. When he’d first arrived a few years earlier, he stood out as something of a loner, but he had since become a familiar face, a little odd perhaps, but an interesting fellow nonetheless, with a background in nuclear physics and an uncle or cousin or some sort of relative who had invented the hovercraft.

Terry Carroll, a Catch regular who lectured in computer technology and digital systems at the University of Westminster, remembered Drewe striding into the bar for the first time. “Instantly you knew someone was in, that the lights were on,” he said. Drewe was six feet tall, intense, and clearly intelligent. He was accompanied by a friend of Carroll’s, Peter Harris, a veteran of the armed forces with wild red hair and an improbable stew of wartime tales. Harris introduced him to Carroll and suggested that the two probably had a lot in common.

Carroll had studied physics and gone on to work in the field of artificial intelligence. Drewe said he had studied abroad, at Kiel University in Germany, and then in Paris, where he had taken to the streets during the May ’68 demonstrations. Subsequently, he had worked at the city-sized atomic energy research complex in Harwell, near Oxford, where he’d made substantial and lasting contacts with the police and with MI5. Those contacts were useful in his current line of work, which included consulting for the Defence Ministry.

Carroll said that he too had worked at Harwell, back when he was a young physicist analyzing various materials with the use of neutron beams. Harwell was so enormous that most employees knew only a small fraction of the layout, but Drewe recalled the place as vividly as if he’d been there the day before.

Whenever Drewe spotted Carroll at the pub after that first night, he greeted him warmly and bought him a beer. Usually he dominated the conversation. He liked to talk about defense technology, and said he was developing a handgun that could fire a thousand rounds a minute. On a good night, he sounded like Ian Fleming on Dexedrine. He told Carroll that once, after a meeting at the Defence Ministry had gone late into the night, he was accidentally locked in the parking garage. Fortunately, he had recently been demonstrating the effects of a powerful explosive called pentrite, and he had a small supply on hand. With it, he had blown the garage door off its hinges.

Carroll found the story amusing and a little strange, but he didn’t ask for details. He knew quite a bit about pentrite from his own army training, and it was obvious that Drewe was well versed in detonators, boosters, and initiators. The man was an all-rounder, he thought.

Drewe never forgot a name or a face, and seemed able to retain every last stray piece of data. He could recite Newton’s laws of motion, Maxwell’s equations, and the principles of quantum mechanics. Carroll envied his ability to remember it all. Drewe explained that he compartmentalized information so he could call it up for use whenever he needed it. It was effortless, he said, like pulling documents out of a filing cabinet. He could remember every room he’d been in, every nuance of every story he’d been told, every twist and turn. No bit of information was trivial to him. He was a data sponge, a Hoover of books, journals, and news.

“John was able, almost at will, to drop in important parts of the history of physics from memory,” Carroll recalled, “and in doing so to convey the impression of a much greater understanding of the subject area in which he purported to be expert.”

Drewe created an entire informational universe from other people’s lives, storing potentially useful morsels and retaining details of the quirks and professional habits of each of his acquaintances. He would look them straight in the eye with his flat, unwavering stare, listen intently, and come away with flakes of character and personality, pieces so small his marks hardly knew anything was gone.

Drewe often boasted to Terry Carroll that he had a pilot’s license, that he loved flying helicopters, and that he was an accomplished hang glider. Carroll thought it would be nice to surprise his friend with a private visit to the Concorde, and on a clear day the two men drove out to Heathrow in Drewe’s Bentley. On the giant airliner, at the pilot’s invitation, Drewe took the controls in his hands. He looked as excited as a four-year-old with a lollipop, and asked a variety of technical questions. (Interestingly, Goudsmid would later tell police that Drewe had a mortal fear of flying.) On the way home he expounded on various theories of unmanned flight and drone weaponry, and Carroll noted again that he had a sophisticated understanding of physics. Years later Carroll realized that Drewe had simply memorized basic concepts from physics textbooks.

Drewe quickly added Terry Carroll to his collection of unwitting accomplices. The soft-spoken lecturer was developing powerful intelligence-gathering software that could be applied to various disciplines. Drewe told Carroll he was sure the Home Office would be interested in the software for a newly proposed national computerized fingerprint identification system, as would the auction houses for an international database for art. Drewe said that he could broker both potential deals. Soon he was bringing an assortment of interesting characters to Carroll’s office: a group of MI6 and Scotland Yard acquisition officers; a handful of Russian and South African officials; a Chinese military attaché and his computer specialist. Carroll couldn’t help but be impressed.

Another candidate for Drewe’s crew was Peter Harris, the larger-than-life armed forces veteran who had introduced him to Carroll. Harris was well into his fifties, a hard drinker and smoker who had already lost a lung, and whose appointment with oblivion was neatly stamped on his forehead. A retired commercial artist, Harris supplemented his income by working an early morning paper route and subletting his flat, most recently to Carroll.

Harris’s friends would probably have pitied him if he hadn’t been such a great raconteur. He claimed that in the late 1960s, while fighting in Aden in the British Army’s last colonial counterinsurgency campaign, he had stood his ground after a sniper shot one of his mates dead. Wearing the Tartan kilt of the Argyle Highlanders, he had picked up his bagpipes and marched down a bullet-pocked street playing “Scotland the Brave” and daring the bastards to finish him off. Or so the story went.

It was questionable whether Harris had ever seen combat, but the Catch-22 was a perfect venue for such yarns, with its collection of armchair warriors and tin soldiers who enjoyed the camaraderie of real fighters. Britain was filled with barflies who lied about their war service. Many of the kingdom’s khaki fantasists claimed to have served in the elite Special Air Service (SAS), or as commandos during the Falklands War, or in the bomb-disposal squads in Northern Ireland. Drewe also claimed to have belonged to an elite military unit, one of several in the British Army that operated covertly against the IRA in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, relying on spies, “dirty ops” informers, and army and loyalist death squads. Terry Carroll realized much later that Drewe, who could reel off military commands, ranks, and lists of weapons, probably got most of his information from spy novels and military manuals.