He had been careful with the cash he’d made from Drewe’s enterprise, and he now had a small measure of financial security. He’d put aside an emergency fund of £18,000 as a modest backup, and had reapplied for the teaching job he’d held nine years earlier. Perhaps as a form of self-punishment, he’d given up painting for pleasure. All his life he’d felt the need to paint, but when he looked back on his days as an artist forger, he realized that his special skills with a brush had brought more heartache than joy. Certainly there were days when he missed being in thrall to artistic expression, but it seemed like a fair trade. He had something more precious now—peace and quiet—and he’d just bought a new keyboard and programmed it to play flute and strings and sequences of electronic Mozart.

Still, he knew that he wasn’t entirely free. Of the more than 240 paintings he had produced for Drewe, at least a handful were clunkers, forgeries so poor that they would almost certainly come to light eventually. Someone would spot one on a wall and report it to a luckless collector, who would call the police. For all Myatt knew the end was a matter of weeks or months away, but he did his best to put it out of his mind.

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’s Hagar in the Wilderness. As he waited for the children to return in the school bus, his heart was pumping and he felt sick to his stomach. That evening he didn’t say a word to them about what had happened. His world had just been turned upside down, and he thought he had nowhere to go. Then he remembered an old family friend who was a retired policeman. They’d sung in the church choir together and were friendly. Myatt rang him up, told him everything, and asked for his advice.

There was nothing to do but cooperate, the old cop said. Drewe would never admit his guilt, and would blame Myatt for everything. “My advice to you is not to dig yourself into a hole.”

Myatt was relieved. Conceivably he could have tried to concoct an elaborate fabrication, but that probably wasn’t going to work. When he returned to the station a few days later, he was more than ready to talk.

Myatt told Searle everything he knew about the operation, including his use of house paint, a confession that shocked the detective but was later corroborated by a forensic analysis identifying a resin not available at the time the paintings supposedly had been made. Myatt said that most of the money he’d earned from Drewe in commissions had been spent—among other things, on covering half of Drewe’s £20,000 donation to the Tate—but that he would turn over the £18,000 he had left.

After the initial interviews Myatt began a series of regular trips to the city to meet Searle at the Belgravia Police Station, which had jurisdiction over the part of town where the best galleries were located. The walls outside the basement interview room had been freshly painted, and dozens of Myatt’s forgeries, wrapped in heavy polyethylene, were lined up in the corridors, all tracked down by police through the help of auction houses and dealers. It seemed to Myatt that although the police had already confiscated scores of pieces, they’d missed the best stuff. The really good work was still out there in penthouses and villas. Drewe had often boasted that he’d placed premium Myatts with collectors in New York and Paris, in Tokyo, Italy, and Bahrain.

As Searle brought a succession of Myatt’s works into the interview room, he spoke slowly and precisely, for the record.

“Now we are unwrapping exhibit number BsG 192. Did you paint this?”

“I did.”

“And do you recognize this painting over here?”

“I do.”

And so on down memory lane, to the next canvas and the next, as Myatt recalled when and where he’d painted each one, occasionally noting how beautifully Drewe had framed them. The professor had never been artistically inclined, but he had an eye for presentation.

The Belgravia officers referred to the collection as “the Black Museum.” They would come down to the subterranean gallery with raised eyebrows and scoff at the obscene prices that the “Sutherlands,” “Dubuffets,” and “Braques” might have fetched if they hadn’t been pulled in. They nicknamed the Dubuffets “the BSE cows,” after bovine spongiform encephalopathy—mad cow disease.

Searle took on the roles of inquisitor, aesthetic gendarme, therapist, and moral arbiter. He was convinced that Myatt was no career criminal and that he’d stumbled off the path despite his better self. Before long the two men developed a rapport and began exchanging notes on the quality of the forgeries.

“You were certainly having a good day when you did this one,” Searle said, when he came across a particularly good fake. If a work was shoddy or below par, he didn’t hesitate to needle Myatt: “Don’t tell me you painted this one.”

In the basement of the station house, Searle came to see that Myatt was technically brilliant and an excellent draftsman. He was also a skilled forger able to fake a brushstroke or a line without losing the vivacity of the original. He understood the importance of loose ends and the power of an unfinished work. Amateur forgers and restorers, in their quest for a perfect canvas invulnerable to criticism, tended to overwork a painting and lose the feel of the artist. Myatt, by contrast, seemed to work without a net and liked to leave his paintings wide open.

There were times when Searle brought in a really good piece and it took Myatt a minute or two to recognize it. Some pieces were obvious duds; others were better than he remembered them. Searle worked him so hard that by the end of the day Myatt felt as if he were back on the M6 with his shovel and pick.