What is the CID for?

This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.

At 2.23am on 29 November 2019, 19-year-old Zac Brettler walked onto the balcony of a fifth-floor luxury apartment overlooking the Thames and jumped into the river. His leap was captured by a camera on the MI6 building, on the opposite side of the river. On the way down, Zac’s hip clipped the embankment wall. He was probably unconscious as soon as he hit the water. His body was spotted on the foreshore in front of the Riverwalk apartment block by a passer-by shortly after 7am. The pathologist who examined his remains said that his broken jaw could not readily be explained by the fall.

In this completely engrossing book, the American investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe scrutinises Zac’s short life and mysterious death and, along the way, considers the capital’s underworld and the deeply troubling failures of its police force. Zac, the second son of Matthew and Rachelle, was from a loving, middle-class London family.

Matthew is in financial services. Rachelle is a journalist, daughter of Hugo Gryn, a well-known rabbi and BBC broadcaster. It was when Zac started attending a private school in North London that his personality seemed to change.

The school numbered the offspring of Russian oligarchs amongst its pupils, and Zac became “gripped by a kind of aspirational fantasy — and a lifestyle of splashy, macho flamboyance”. He started hanging out with Akbar Shamji, a wealthy businessman in his 40s. Zac told his parents about lucrative deals he and Shamji were cooking up, and Shamji introduced the boy to another wheeler-dealer type, Dave Sharma, an executive with Pirelli. It was from Sharma’s apartment that Zac leapt to his death.

The Brettlers had been concerned about their younger son’s lifestyle. When Rachelle couldn’t get him on the phone on the morning of 29 November, concern turned to worry. That evening, they reported Zac missing. They managed to get hold of the mysterious Shamji for the first time. He told them that he, Zac and Sharma had spent the evening at Sharma’s apartment where Zac confessed to them that he was addicted to heroin.

They assumed he had gone off somewhere in the middle of the night. Furthermore, he and Sharma knew Zac as “Zac Ismailov”, the son of a Russian oligarch. Zac Ismailov was on the verge of coming into a great fortune once some legal business had been completed. Zac’s parents were astonished at this double life their son had been leading.

However, if Zac had spun Shamji and Sharma a pack of lies, they hadn’t exactly been straight with him either. Akbar Shamji was a conman, and Verinder — his real name — Sharma was a feared gangster known as “Indian Dave”. Sharma was suspected of ordering the contract killing of another underworld figure, and he was rumoured to have used a hacksaw to castrate someone who had crossed him.

At one point, he was on the Metropolitan Police’s list of the ten most wanted. You might have thought that a young man jumping from Sharma’s apartment would pique the police’s interest, yet from the very beginning the Met seemed reluctant to consider any possibility other than straightforward suicide.

The extensive list of people that the police didn’t think it worth interviewing includes, but is not limited to, Sharma’s daughter Dominique, who was at the apartment on the fateful night and who had received a phone call from Dad seconds after Zac had gone off the balcony; and Mervin Sealy, a friend of Shamji’s and the recipient of a text from him sent from the Riverwalk apartment just hours before Zac’s death saying, “I am not fucking playing. I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood.”

The last thing Zac searched for on his iPad was “what to do with skin burns”. Again, the officers on the “investigation’” appeared unconcerned by these sinister revelations. The police were also in possession of data from a tracker in a rental car that Shamji was driving on the night of Zac’s death that completely contradicted the story that he had told them about his movements. The cops weren’t interested.

Radden Keefe expertly leads us through a complicated and disturbing story. We will never know for certain what happened in Zac’s last few hours, but his parents don’t believe he was suicidal or a heroin addict, and Radden Keefe proposes a chillingly plausible scenario in which the youngster jumped to save his life, not to take it.

London Falling is light on humour, but I did laugh out loud when I read that the Metropolitan Police had brazenly claimed that “every line of enquiry had been exhausted”. No one has ever been charged in relation to Zac’s death.