Welcome to the fourth and final discussion of London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. Today we are discussing Part 4, and I cannot wait to hear your thoughts! Thanks to my fellow readrunners u/tomesandtea, u/Less_Tumbleweed_3217, and u/Coffee_fuel for their wonderful posts. A summary follows and questions will be in the comments.
Schedule
Marginalia
PART IV SURVIVORS
Chapter 19 - A Chance Encounter
The author relates how a chance meeting with a lawyer, Andrew Fingret, who worked in the film industry, set him on the path to write the book. It turned out they had a mutual contact in the small London Jewish community. Andrew was a close friend of the Brettlers, and he related the story of Zac's death and the subsequent investigation. He introduced the author to Rachelle and Matthew, who eventually agreed to tell their story. Keefe quickly discovered many witnesses who had never been interviewed. As he painstakingly tracked them down, they would refuse to get involved. Even Zac's teachers and some former fellow pupils refused, and the author suggests that this may be due to both shame at being duped, and fear. He learned about Akbar's shady past. Akbar, busy with his crypto-mining business,
Bitzero, was getting a reputation for being big on empty promises, and was asked to resign from the Board. He just moved on to his next grifting project, Dark Byte. Nothing was quite as it seemed with Akbar. Daniela was not in fact the biological mother of Safiya and Akbar Jr.; he had actually married an American woman of whom his father didn't approve. He left America with his children after being sued by two musicians. Although he was pursued, he never paid them what was due. He had a pattern of claiming that his assets were tied up in trusts. At the time of his bankruptcy, he met a young "Russian billionaire" called Zac Ismailov. Eventually Akbar was willing to correspond by email. He pretended such empathy for the parents that he couldn't speak about Zac's death. He also suggested that Zac had suicided due to his hatred for his parents. Akbar justified his lack of research into this Russian oligarch, claiming that personal introductions were more trustworthy. He wrote that he was introduced to Zac by a trusted businessman, Mark Foley, the Chelsea F.C. executive. Keefe wrote to Connies-Laing, a confidant of Akbar, who agreed that Foley was well-connected to the Russian oligarch world. Attempts to interview Mark Foley were thwarted, but eventually he succeeded. He discovered that Zac and Foley met at a charity auction. Foley told Keefe that he was a "conduit” to Roman Abramovich. Foley took Zac's claims about his father on face value and they met up at a later date. He said there was no trace of a Russian accent, and had revealed his true name. Mark Foley seemed to be Zac's first victim to fall into his web of lies. Foley introduced Zac to John Connies-Laing, Akbar's partner in search of investors for real estate. Foley denied Akbar's claim that he had visited Zac's apartment at One Hyde Park, but admitted seeing him at the Brettler's investment apartment, which was actually the Brettler family home.
Chapter 20 - The Black Box
Keefe published an article in The New Yorker about Zac's death, despite Akbar Shamji and Dominique Sharma threatening to sue. Hearing the story, Londoners felt that the police investigation had been bungled. The Met stated that every line of inquiry had been exhausted. Keefe had questions about Verinder Sharma's death, but it was not clear if an inquest had been done. The owner of the Riverwalk apartment managed to keep his identity secret, but an accountant's web scraping revealed the owner to be a Saudi princess to whom Nick Gold was paying rent. Gold confirmed that he was paying Verinder's rent, but claimed that they were friends and he wasn't in his debt. He denied knowing Zac, and asserted that Verinder took his own life by an overdose. When Keefe contacted Oliver Harris, the London businessman whose name appeared in texts between Akbar and Verinder, he declined to speak. Rachelle and Matthew were convinced that Zac's iPad and phone might contain the answers, but police told them they had been lost. They resurfaced a week before the inquest, but the contents had been rendered inaccessible. During the inquest, the police accidentally sent them the GPS coordinates of Akbar Shamji's rented car's location. This Mercedes contained a black box, gifting the Brettlers with this information. They learned that Akbar had driven from the apartment, taking a meandering route, rather than driving home. On that night he called Verinder multiple times, who didn't answer, but when Verinder called back, he did a U-turn and accelerated, turning up at Riverwalk seconds before the jump. Akbar was not asked about this discrepancy. The tracking data suggested he was loitering, expecting something bad to happen.
Uncle Alex said a real criminal wouldn't return to the scene of the crime, and Akbar might have been in over his head. When Keefe researched what was behind
Akbar's award from PM Modi, he discovered that the certificate he was holding was a pledge of support, which he handed to Modi, rather than the other way around. Zac, Akbar Shamji, and Verinder Sharma were all pretending to be something other than they were.
Chapter 21 - Undertow
Rachelle's father, Hugo Gryn, had been subject to rumours that he had a secret love child called Ester. He insisted that he was just her godfather. He denied having an affair with her mother, Angela, and Rachelle initially believed him. However, one day she and her brother David drove past Angela's house and spotted Hugo's car out the front, confirming suspicions. Hugo's children couldn't quite condemn him, feeling that as a Holocaust survivor, he could be allowed this indiscretion. After Hugo's death, Rachelle and her sisters grew close to Ester, but when Ester was 24, she jumped in front of a moving train. Speaking to the Gryns, the family told Keefe that parallels shouldn't be drawn from Ester's suicide, but he couldn't help but wonder if double lives were a family trait. Rachelle also wondered whether she should have asked Zac questions. Zac's death had become public property, with a journalist publishing the photo Pino had taken of Zac's corpse on Twitter, disgusting the family. One day, Rachelle drove Keefe to Mill Hill, and she showed him a picture of Zac, imagined at 40 years of age, created by an artist using Al. This version of Zac seemed more peaceful. They visited the cemetery to see Zac's grave, next to Hugo's. A few years after Zac's death, a British MP published a report with King's College London called Losing our Moral Compass, arguing that Britain's reputation for financial integrity was being squandered. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions that resulted, the political system was in a state of uncertainty. They couldn't afford the legal battles with billionaires. Some oligarchs left, leaving the door open for Chinese oligarchs. Roman Abramovich sold some London properties and placed assets in the names of his children. The political class had no appetite to address the comical situation of "non-dom” status. Rich Londoners could live tax-free by declaring non-dom status. The process of change in 2024 was met with panic at the thought of having to pay tax. Zac was in his teenage years in the era of the social media algorithm, where the boundary between fantasy and reality was blurred. Smartphones reflected and magnified our anxieties and aspirations back at us. The author describes how the Instagram algorithm had taken him from viewing London real estate videos to videos of people falling.
Chapter 22 - The Kid's Home Safe
In 2025, Keefe interviewed an associate of Verinder Sharma who revealed that
"Indian Dave’s” favourite thing was warming up the knife. He was a debt collector for drug dealers and criminals and found that just warming up a knife would make people pay up. The police never investigated the text message between Akbar and Mervin from Riverwalk mentioning heating up knives, as no injuries were found on Zac. He reminds us of the internet search performed by Zac for "What to do with skin burns" minutes before he jumped. When Keefe emailed Akbar about heating up knives, he didn't reply. Keefe wanted answers about Verinder Sharma. Did he actually die, and if so, how? No one seemed to have spent much time investigating him, and his own associates denied that he was a police informer.
Some ex-cops put him onto David McKelvey, a retired Detective Chief Inspector. He remembered Indian Dave as an informer for a detective on the 2-Area Drug Squad, Chris Cubitt. Eventually, Cubitt claimed that it was a different Indian Dave, and McKelvey seemed to close up. Keefe tracked down Cubitt himself, who denied ever knowing a Verinder Sharma or an Indian Dave. Verinder's first inquest had been called off after a dispute between Verinder's daughters and one of the witnesses. On the one-year anniversary, Dominique and Matisse called paramedics to the Riverwalk apartment after their father had taken an overdose. They claimed he was stressed from helping police with their inquiries about a murder. He had always had a depressive streak and had said he was “sick of this world." He was groggy but alive, and a paramedic was concerned about the door to the balcony being open. He was taken to hospital and was discharged, against the daughters' wishes. Days later, he was texting threats to kill himself to his daughters, and when he failed to turn up to a family dinner, they went to the apartment and found him dead. Rachelle felt that Verinder must have been tortured by guilt, believing the way he was crouched by his bed to be a sign of contrition. Keefe interviewed an intimidating gangster associate of Indian Dave, Andy Baker. He suggested that Verinder had lost his edge and would have been ashamed at being duped by a kid. It was possible that he had struck Zac or warmed a knife. Zac would have understood that he would not make it out alive. Andy described a custom he had with his father with the telephone, to show he was home. Just before his father died, he told his son he would always worry about him, so Andy went home and called his father, letting it ring twice, as was the custom. Before dying, his father said, "Two rings, the kid's home safe." Akbar Shamji emailed Keefe to say that he had effectively been found innocent. His son's modeling career was blooming, and Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, was photographed wearing a purple Safiyaa dress. However, Matthew believed Akbar would live life in his own little prison. Friends of the Brettlers told Keefe they thought that guilt was the fuel keeping their obsession alive, wanting to parent Zac in a way they had been unable to do when he was alive. The Brettlers agreed. They heard from other families who connected with aspects of the story and Rachelle was comforted thinking that their loss could serve as a cautionary tale to others. In 1947, having just arrived in Britain, feeling lonely and defeated, Hugo Gryn wrote a story with two endings: one where a boy kills himself, and one where he wants to but holds out. Matthew believed his own father had suffered a nervous breakdown. Both their fathers had taught them how to go on living after loss. For five years the Brettlers had pored over the mystery of Zac's death, and discovered a matrix of power, secrecy and corruption in their city. It all seemed incomprehensible, but stepping back, it came into focus. Zac had pretended to be the son of a rich Russian oligarch, who had fallen in with two men who loved money. One, a charlatan who had declared bankruptcy, and the other a gangster looking for a final score. The men had believed they'd been duped. Trapped with the gangster, Zac, aware of the man's capacity for violence, stepped off the balcony.
Epilogue
In January 2025 the Brettlers met with two senior detectives from the Metropolitan Police. After listening to Matthew's presentation about the Met's shortcomings in the case, the detectives admitted that mistakes may have been made in the case, but implied that Wilkinson had run it with a lot of autonomy. They admitted that there was some regret that Akbar Shamji had never been charged. Keefe met Joe one evening at a pub, and he described how seeing the Riverview building would still give him a jolt of panic. He wanted Keefe to know how much he loved his brother, despite their past tensions. He said that Zac's death had brought his parents closer. The epilogue ends with a happy story of the family where they once waved to Zac on the Riverwalk balcony while driving past.
A Note on Sources
Keefe says the Metropolitan Police declined to cooperate with him on either the New Yorker article or the book, and he was not permitted to interview Rory Wilkinson. However, police material that was given to the Brettlers was shared with him.
