Provenance

Goudsmid wandered through Golders Green in a daze. She looked unkempt and could barely eat. She had lost her children and most of her savings to Drewe, and now he was threatening to take the house on Rotherwick Road. Detective Higgs had been her last hope, and she was close to the breaking point. She went inside her home, got down on all fours in the living room with a Magic Marker, and made a picket sign that accused John Drewe of being a criminal. Then she drove to his country home and stood outside with her sign. A neighbor took pity and brought her a cup of tea. She felt as if she were going mad, but she was determined to fight until the children were back with her and Drewe was behind bars.

It would have been out of character for Goudsmid to back down. She was brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust, and her parents were both survivors. At age eighteen, like most Israelis, she was drafted into the army. Outside Tel Aviv, in former British army camps, in hundred-degree heat, she and her fellow conscripts trained to shoot. They went out with their Uzis and practiced on cardboard cutouts, peppering the silhouettes until they were exhausted. When Goudsmid’s mandatory tour of duty was over, she decided to stay on and signed up for the navy. She was focused and ambitious, and by the time she left the Israeli Defense Force she carried her training like a second skin.

Goudsmid had an air of imperviousness that could be misunderstood as intimidating. She had learned to be careful and observant, to question everything she saw. She noticed the most mundane detail, an unusual movement or suspicious package, a telltale accent in a crowd. But she had somehow let her guard down when she met John Drewe at a small get-together in London in 1980. An attentive man, he courted her vigorously. In restrospect, she could never quite explain this blunder, except to say that she was a recent immigrant, lonely, and several weeks pregnant by a former boyfriend at the age of thirty-four. She had no nearby family to speak of, and Drewe was a polite and well-to-do nuclear physicist who offered her his friendship.

On their first date, Drewe picked her up in a chauffered white Rolls. His driver wore a cap and uniform, and Drewe sat in back smiling and holding a bouquet of roses. He was good-looking, with short black hair and an athletic build, and he wore a well-tailored suit and a long coat.

He laughed, folded her into the backseat, and took her to a very good restaurant, where they talked for hours. He was an adviser to the Atomic Energy Authority, he said, and served on the boards of several companies, including British Aerospace. His time was his own. He worked in his lab and at home, where he wrote for the specialty journals. She noticed that he had a scar, and he explained that as a young man he’d had a passion for motorcycles, and that he’d hit a patch of ice one winter’s night and slid across the road.

The next time they met she talked about her hometown, and told him how hard it was to grow up in a family that had been shattered by the Holocaust. Her parents had fled Germany and were now living in Holland, but less fortunate relatives had ended up in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. More than three hundred members of her extended family had died in the camps. After the war, her parents received compensation from Germany and passed some of the money on to her. She planned to use it to buy a modest apartment in London.

Drewe was always attentive: He would open the door for her and make her dinner and put his coat over her when it was cold. He phoned her at least once a day and surprised her with flowers and the odd bit of jewelry. It was a relief having him around. One summer day he picked her up and took her to Sussex to hear Mozart at the centuries-old Glyndebourne opera house. During a long intermission they went outside and picnicked. She told him she was pregnant and wanted to keep the baby, and he promised to help in any way he could. A few months before she was due to give birth, he suggested that he move in with her so he could help her through the difficult times. She wasn’t sure whether she was in love with him, but his caring presence was no small comfort, and she thought he might make a good father and provide a safety net for the infant.

Goudsmid named her son Nadav, meaning “generous of heart.” A year and a half after his birth, she and Drewe had a baby daughter, whom they named Atarah, the Hebrew word for “crown.” Drewe bought the children more toys than they would ever have time to play with, drove them to day care, and was gentle with them when they were sick. He was often the only father in the playground, where the nannies dubbed him “the professor.”

When Drewe asked Goudsmid to marry him, she said she needed time to think about it. There was something a little off about him, she thought. He claimed to be obsessed with her but seemed happiest when he was alone, working or reading in his room. Whenever she had friends over, he tended to stay in the background, pouring drinks and keeping the coffeepot going, but she could feel him hovering, and it always came as a relief when he disappeared upstairs. Finally she turned down his marriage proposal: The present arrangement was good enough, she said. Drewe continued to introduce her as his wife.

As she would later describe in sworn testimony, when Goudsmid bought the house on Rotherwick Road, Drewe persuaded her to put it in both their names, and to take out a mortgage for a good deal more than she had intended. He reminded her that they were about to receive £2 million from the elusive John Catch. When the money failed to materialize, he brought in several paintings, purportedly from Catch’s collection, and told her the profits from the sale of the works would make them rich.

One day she looked out the window and saw Drewe crouched in the garden with a vacuum-cleaner bag and a bucket of dirt that he was smearing on a Giacometti painting. When she asked him what on earth he was doing, he said that the painting had been sitting in Catch’s vault for years and looked “too fresh.” Drewe was applying a traditional marketing technique that gave paintings a weathered look and made them easier to sell.

Goudsmid took little interest in Drewe’s work. Their relationship had cooled considerably since they first moved to Rotherwick Road. He was always busy, on the hustle, out and about to restaurants and fancy parties, and she was doing well enough with her own career. He once invited her to a soiree at the Chinese embassy, where he introduced her to the military attaché. It was a dull evening, and she had turned down subsequent invitations.

Drewe began making occasional deposits of thousands of pounds into their joint account, but he also dipped into it heavily, burning through as much as £12,000 a month and covering the frequent overdrafts in dribs and drabs. He explained the expenses as the cost of “entertaining business clients,” but she eventually stopped depositing her salary into the account. They often fought, and she asked him several times to leave. He refused, saying it was best to wait until the children were older.

Goudsmid and Drewe slept in separate rooms and rarely ate together. She would leave the house early in the morning and work late. When he returned from his business meetings, he would shut himself up in his room with his newspapers and books. He had dozens of books on the Mossad and MI5, on science, mysticism, and the occult, and a whole section on the kabbalah. He ordered reading matter by the box-ful and stored the overflow in the garage behind the Bentley.

By the time Nadav turned ten, he was a computer whiz, and Drewe began to spend more time alone with him. Goudsmid would see them in the glow of the terminal with piles of documents scattered around them. Drewe had a supply of scissors and paste, and a small box filled with rubber stamps and tools a lepidopterist might have found useful. Once, she surprised him as he was using a small paring knife on a document. He told her he had lost the receipt for one of John Catch’s paintings and needed to “reproduce” it.

He also told her he had inherited a dozen guns from his father and kept them in the attic. Once, at a particularly low point in their relationship, he brought a few of them down and polished them in front of her.

Around this time Drewe made a surprising confession: Some of his paintings had come from Catch’s German-born brother, a former director at I. G. Farben, the notorious German chemical company that made poison gas for the Nazi death chambers. The brother had been given the paintings in recognition of his services to the Third Reich. Goudsmid was shocked and disgusted, and in late 1993 she told Drewe she’d had enough. She’d been offered a job in the United States and was moving to California. The children would be going with her.

Not long afterward, Drewe emptied their joint account and moved out. He called her supervisors at the hospital and told them she was abusing the children. He circulated the notion that she was suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and she was temporarily suspended from her job. Family court forbade her from making contact with her children, but she fought the court order and was eventually allowed visitation rights with the children. She was certain that Drewe had brainwashed the kids and lied to them in order to keep them away from her. Now he was after the house, and she feared she would soon be homeless.

Higgs’s investigation became a lifeline: If she could get Drewe behind bars, family court would listen to her and give her children back. She had no doubt that Drewe had set fire to the house on Lowfield Road, and that he was capable of murder. In the past he’d hinted darkly at his work with Britain’s intelligence services, and claimed to have loaned the Crown his expertise in defensive weaponry and traveled abroad on behalf of the foreign service.

When Goudsmid threatened to go to the police and tell them about his art scam, Drewe said it was useless. He’d been promoted to the post of chief director of the powerful MI-10—an agency that was set up during World War II for weapons and technical analysis—and no one would believe her.