Provenance

Higgs was sure he was dealing with a con man. Batsheva Goudsmid had given him a list of Drewe’s acquaintances, each of whom had provided a slightly different version of the professor. Some knew him as a physicist and researcher, others as a consultant for the intelligence services. Still others described a man who had spent his time working abroad on behalf of the government in some mysterious capacity. They were all willing to vouch for him, but none of them had anything substantial to contribute to the slim profile the police had assembled.

Higgs knew that people lied all the time, and that fibbing was an integral part of everyday communication. He had seen prevaricators of every sort during his many years on the job. Studies suggesting that people lied on average once or twice a day would not have surprised him.

Higgs wanted to hear his voice again. He pulled out the audio-tapes of Drewe’s interrogation after the fire and put on his headphones. The voice was as he remembered it, soft, elegant, and assured. Drewe sounded absolutely calm until one of his interrogators interrupted him, and then he sighed theatrically and his tone changed. When he was asked to repeat an answer, he sounded as exasperated as a teacher in a classroom of half-wits. Questioned about his stint in academe, the professor had refused to say where he taught.

Higgs put the headphones away and began calling around to the universities to see if Drewe’s claims stood up. Britain’s universities gave out professorships only to the most distinguished scholars, so Higgs was skeptical. He discovered that there was no record of Drewe’s having taught in Britain or on the Continent, and that while he claimed to have conducted research in Russia, Germany, and France, he had never published a single paper. Higgs doubted Drewe had ties to the intelligence community, as he had claimed; if he did, MI5 would already have warned the detective off.

Rummaging through police databases, Higgs’s investigators were unable to find tax or medical records, a driver’s license or credit history for John Drewe. They learned that he and Goudsmid had opened a joint bank account and cosigned a substantial mortgage for the house on Rotherwick Road, but that the down payment and the risk were apparently all hers. While Higgs could find no evidence that Drewe had earned, saved, or owed any money, the man was clearly doing well for himself, for he had a bodyguard/chauffeur on retainer and a good table at Claridge’s.

Higgs studied the composite of the man Horoko Tominaga had seen shortly before the fire. It bore a slight resemblance to Drewe. When he called the professor to ask a few follow-up questions, Drewe was no longer quite as affable as he had been earlier.

Drewe knew that Higgs had been asking around about him, and he warned that this fresh round of inquiry verged on harassment. If Higgs did not leave him alone, Drewe would lodge a protest with the head of the Police Complaints Authority. He said he was good friends with the chief and mentioned him by name. Higgs suspected that he was bluffing and immediately rang the PCA to see if anyone had called to ask for the chief’s name. He had guessed correctly: Just a few days earlier an unidentified gentleman had called to ask that very question. Slippery fellow, thought Higgs.

The detective had his own reasons for disliking con men. During his years on the force, he’d faced off against several of them. On one occasion he received a report from a hotel manager on Oxford Street about a suspicious-looking briefcase left in the lobby. Higgs rushed to the hotel, opened the case, and discovered a pile of financial statements, photocopied documents that were clearly cut-and-paste jobs, an assortment of IDs, some blank company stationery, and ink and rubber stamps.

As he rummaged through the briefcase, the owner returned, spotted Higgs, and bolted. The detective chased him into the afternoon traffic, dodging buses, climbing over turnstiles and store display cases, until he finally tackled him. During the struggle Higgs took a kick to the side of the head that left him permanently deaf in one ear.

The perp’s rap sheet described a lifelong con artist who had recently taken a job as a night-shift cleaner at a pension fund in order to gather information about its finances. He was about to complete a wire transfer of £750,000 from its account when Higgs caught up with him. Much like Drewe, the perp was a fast talker and a persuasive chameleon.

Higgs’s other close encounter with hucksters was more personal. His mother, a tough Scotswoman who had raised three children during wartime, had been conned repeatedly by phone charmers preying on the elderly. Generally, they would call at suppertime to tell her she had won a prize she could access only by calling a certain telephone number. She would spend hours on the line, running up bills at premium rates chasing dreams.

Higgs had read up on professional scammers and found that criminologists had developed a psychological blueprint of the confidence man based on descriptions provided by their unhappy marks. Most victims recalled the con man’s beautiful delivery, the effect of his purring voice on the semicircular canals of the inner ear, the perfect timber and cadence, the whiff of expertise. The come-on produced a feeling that something unprecedented was on the way, a shift in fortune, a sea change. Experts referred to this phenomenon as the “phantom dream” and considered it the basis of every decent scam. The mark always craved something that was out of reach, and the con man knew how to identify the mark’s particular longing and zero in on it. A good confidence man could pick his mark out of a crowd as easily as a spotted hyena could tag a sick wildebeest. Once the game was up and the embarassed mark realized he’d been had, he would invariably stumble into the police station to describe the rake’s method, his extraordinary lightness of touch, his talent for skating around craters of logic, for touching the victim deep down, in broad daylight, under the glow of his own ineffable charm.

With his pathological urge to reinvent himself, Drewe was one of a long line of con artists and fakers. London, like other major cities, had always been a magnet for dream peddlers. Over the years its detectives had seen some of the world’s great con men up close. In the 1920s, a Scottish scammer named Arthur Furguson discovered that it was child’s play to take visiting Americans for a ride: He sold Nelson’s Column to slow-witted souvenir hunters for 600 quid a shot, offered Big Ben for a £1,000 down payment, and fobbed off Buckingham Palace for a first installment of £200. When Furguson realized that Yanks made particularly easy marks, he set up shop in the United States. In 1925, he found a rancher willing to lease the White House for $100,000 a year. Later, less successfully, he tried to sell off the Statue of Liberty to a potential mark who got wise and turned him in. Furguson spent five years in prison but continued to ply his trade until his death in Los Angeles in 1938.

Then there was the Scottish con man Gregor McGregor, who lured hundreds of British investors and would-be settlers from London to the nonexistent country of Poyais in Central America. McGregor escaped with hundreds of thousands of pounds, leaving the settlers stranded in the jungle. A distinguished-looking British hustler named Limehouse Chappie, who worked both sides of the Atlantic, scammed passengers on ocean liners, and may have served as a model for the elegant card-sharp in Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve.

The Bohemian-born con man Victor Lustig, who ran his scams with an American sidekick, engineered the sale of the Eiffel Tower to a group of naïve scrap-metal dealers. Lustig would eventually set his sights on the wide-eyed rubes of the New World. With his apprentice in tow, he hoodwinked the gullible in half a dozen U.S. states, ending up in Alcatraz. His death certificate listed his profession as “Salesman.”

The term “confidence man” was coined by a journalist at the New York Herald to describe the conduct of one William Thompson, a scammer and jailbird whose MO was a three-piece suit and a smile. Thompson would approach wealthy New Yorkers with a self-possessed air, strike up a conversation, and unleash an engaging line of prattle. “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?” he would say, and the victim would cheerfully give up his timepiece. All well and good until July 7, 1849, when Thompson was collared on Liberty Street by an officer named Swayse just as he was taking off with his mark’s $110 gold lever watch. Thompson was returned to Sing Sing, where he’d learned his silken ways.

Eight years later Herman Melville adopted Thompson’s soubriquet as the title of his famously unreadable last novel, The Confidence-Man. Within a decade of its publication criminologists were reporting that 10 percent of professional criminals were confidence men. The sweet-talkers, they said, had taken over the sidewalks.

Professional bilkers often say that it is impossible to con a completely honest man, that the con man relies on the greed of his “vic,” on the poor fellow’s unbridled imagination and his wish to dream himself out of a jam. Social scientists who have tried to chart scammer pathology describe the con man as a combination sociopath and narcissist. Typically, he is impulsive, amoral, and uncontrolled, highly intelligent, detached, misanthropic, grandiose, and hungry for admiration. Alienated and often self-taught, the con man feels unique and superior until he is trapped. Then he claims to be a victim of circumstance or of an uncaring society. He tells police that he has been knackered by circumstance, that his bitterness is a function of society’s failures and the vagaries of fate. Then, on the way to the lockup, knowing that the game is up, he drops all pretense and declares that his victims deserved to be conned, that greed is a fox-trot and it takes two.

One such schemer, quoted in The Psychology of Fraud, a 2001 study published by the Australian Institute of Criminology, told his inquisitors that he felt entirely justified: “The [victim] had it coming. There’s no harm done. He can afford it.” Under questioning, he admitted that the pleasure of the scam was the point of it all. “When I score, I get more kicks out of that than anything,” he said. “To score is the biggest kick of my life.”

One of the more talented and famous con men was Ferdinand Demara, an American hospital orderly who assumed the identity of a doctor during the Korean War and performed a number of successful surgeries. With minimal education, he posed as a civil engineer, a sheriff’s deputy, a prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a lawyer, a Benedictine and a Trappist monk, a cancer researcher, and an editor. While he never made much money at any of these deceptions, he gained a short-lived respectability. A brilliant mimic with a hugely retentive memory, he studied textbooks to master the techniques he needed to perform each new character’s role. Demara, who was portrayed by Tony Curtis in the 1961 movie The Great Impostor, once described his motivation as “rascality, pure rascality.” Six feet tall and 350 pounds, he died in 1982 at age sixty after suffering a heart attack. He had two cardinal rules: First, always remember that the burden of proof is on the accuser, and second, when you’re in danger, attack.

Detective Higgs was beginning to wonder if Batsheva Goudsmid had been conned by Drewe, and if there might not be some truth behind her accusations that he was involved in selling stolen or forged art. For weeks she had been badgering the detective to arrest Drewe, berating him and the rest of his squad. These harangues had done little to endear her to Higgs’s men, serving mainly to reinforce the notion that she was off her rocker, but Higgs had come to feel that her hysteria might be justified. She had reason to think she was under attack.

Higgs called family court and was told that Drewe had indeed been granted custody of the children, and that Goudsmid was considered mentally unstable. They had based their decision, in part, on Drewe’s status in the academic and scientific communities.

By early May, four months after the fire, Higgs still had no evidence that Drewe had a motive for setting the fire. The only strategy left was to put Drewe in a lineup and see if Horoko Tominaga could identify him as the stranger she had seen in the boardinghouse bathroom, a man of average height and weight, in his forties, with glasses and a mustache.

Higgs scheduled the lineup and arranged to have Tominaga flown back from Japan. When she arrived at the Hampstead police station, it was too late: Drewe had already come and gone. He’d complained that the lineup was stacked against him because he was the only one wearing a suit, and would therefore stand out. Higgs knew that if Tominaga had picked Drewe out as the perpetrator, he would have been able to challenge the police successfully in court. The detective was furious: The least his colleagues could have done was loan Drewe a pair of jeans and a shirt.

He rescheduled the lineup for the following week, but when Drewe arrived he was unrecognizable. He had cut his hair short, shaved off his mustache, and shed his glasses. Tominaga looked carefully at each man but could not identify the stranger she had seen in the bathroom. Without her testimony, the police had nothing to go on—not a shred of evidence linking Drewe to arson—and they sent her home.

But there was nothing Higgs could do. He only had the authority to investigate the fire, and Goudsmid’s suggestion that Drewe was being blackmailed by the landlord had been reduced to mere speculation. Whatever evidence there may have been of an elaborate con job had gone up in smoke.