From The Times and Sunday Times, this is the story.

I'm Gabriel Pogrand.

On a cold November night in 2019,

19-year-old Zach Brettler jumped to his death from the balcony of a luxury apartment

on the South Bank of the Thames, directly opposite to MI6 headquarters.

Zach was a smart, affable young man from a loving family who had got mixed up with some very dangerous people.

After an investigation in which police repeatedly returned to the idea that he had killed himself,

they failed to bring any charges. But five years later, the story reached one of the great reporters of our time, Patrick Radden Keith.

I think that they have an impulse to say,

okay, young boy goes off the balcony, looks like he jumps, so what is that? Well, that's a suicide.

I would argue that what happened to Zach Bratler falls in a kind of zone in between those two.

It's something more ambiguous.

What he found suggests a more haunting reality.

Zach didn't jump to die, but perhaps to live.

In a devastating New Yorker Expoise, Patrick dismantled the Metropolitan Police's narrative,

explaining a catalogue of catastrophic failings.

I don't believe he committed suicide. I didn't believe that actually by the time I finished my article.

After more than a year of additional reporting, I'm even more convinced.

Now that investigation is the subject of his latest book, London Falling.

I knew Zach, not well, but well enough to remember him as a little boy, and I'm privileged

to have come to know his family.

I myself investigated this case for the Sunday Times, and what I found was beyond anything

...