London Falling summary

The following morning, an elegantly dressed stranger arrived at the Brettlers’ door asking for Zac. When Rachelle identified herself as his mother, a deep voice coming through the intercom insisted that this was impossible: Zac’s mother lived in Dubai. The stranger drove away. Rachelle was terrified. Something had happened to her son, but what?

Rachelle and Matthew were able to track down Zac’s friend Akbar Shamji, hoping he might have some answers about his whereabouts. That’s when the first bombshell dropped. Akbar revealed that he’d never known anyone by the name of Zac Brettler. To him, their son was Zac Ismailov, heir to a Russian oligarch’s vast fortune. Since he’d been introduced to Zac through Mark Foley, an associate of Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who owned Chelsea Football Club, Akbar never had reason to doubt his claims. Zac had said that his billionaire father had recently died, and that his estranged mother lived in Dubai. Due to an ongoing inheritance dispute, Zac explained, he needed a little help.

Let’s take a little detour here and answer an important question: who was Akbar Shamji? 

To answer this question we have to go back to 1972, when the Shamji family, like many other Asian families, was expelled from Uganda due to the ruthless leadership of Idi Amin. Until that point, Abdul Shamji, Akbar’s father, was one of Uganda’s richest businessmen. And even though Abdul was supposed to leave behind his business and his money, through some creative financial arrangements he was able to quickly rebuild when the family relocated to Britain. Within years, he controlled supermarkets, ships, factories, and property, while at the same time getting cozy with powerful Conservative politicians during the Margaret Thatcher era.

The man in charge of the police investigation into Zac’s death was detective inspector Rory Wilkinson. He reassured Matthew and Rachelle Brettler that, even though the video showed that Zac jumped off the balcony on his own, if he had been threatened or coerced into doing so, it would still be a criminal matter. Indeed, the autopsy showed that he sustained a broken jaw that might have occurred before the fall. It also showed that he had sustained a serious injury to his hip. This most likely occurred when he hit the river embankment on the way down, which may have rendered him unconscious when he hit the river.

As the investigation dragged on for months and the pandemic hit, making progress slow and time itself pass more even slowly, Matthew began his own investigation. One of its key questions being, who was Verinder Sharma?

By February 2022, the police seemed ready to call it a day on Zac’s case. Verinder Sharma had died from a drug overdose, and with no one else to place in the apartment when Zac fell – and no hard evidence suggesting otherwise – they were ready to call his death a suicide and drop all charges against Akbar Shamji.

But Matthew and Rachelle never stopped their own investigation. For example, the police knew that Verinder had telephoned Akbar at 2:12 a.m. on Zac’s final night. Their conversation lasted nine minutes. Two minutes after it ended, Zac went over the balcony. Two minutes after that, Verinder called his daughter Dominique. Yet the police never bothered to formally interview her – or Mervin Sealy, the man Akbar texted about heating up knives and wiping up blood. Since none of these people were in the apartment at the time of Zac’s death, the police didn’t seem to care.

As Keefe continued digging into the story and following up on leads that had gone unchecked, he was also curious about Verinder’s status with the police and how he’d managed to operate so freely for decades.

Former police officers who Keefe spoke to agreed that his status as an informant was a possibility. In fact, one retired detective immediately remembered an “Indian Dave” who had provided high-level intelligence about drugs, guns, and organized crime. The detective gave Keefe the contact information for the officer who supposedly handled him. But when Keefe got through to that person, he very quickly denied knowing anyone by that name. It was a very suspicious denial but, again, nothing could be proved.