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These two guys, one of them extremely dangerous, this guy Indian Dave, and also Akbar Shamji,

these guys realize that they've kind of been had, they've been conned.

And the CCTV footage shows Zach in a state of frenzy.

The police, in my view, really botched the investigation.

And then we don't see what happens, but we know that he never leaves, and his body is found a few days later.

Akbar, on that last evening, is texting another guy.

He says, I'm heating up knives and clearing up blood.

I first met Patrick Radin Keefe a couple of years ago.

He'd begun work on a book which at that point had no

name. He was writing a story of which there was almost no record. It involved a young man,

Zach Brettler, who in 2019 had fallen to his death off the balcony of a luxury London apartment.

The more Patrick studied this death, the more mysterious it became. Zach was a much-loved,

middle-class kid from North London, who at a certain stage in his adolescence had begun to

pass himself off as a Russian oligarch son, moneyed, abandoned, orphaned, a million miles away

from the child he really was. He began associating with

high-powered businessman and with dangerous criminals, men who believed in his story and in his wealth.

What was it about London that allowed that lie to flourish? What was it about the flow of Russian money,

the failures of our police,

and the callousness of those who befriended Zach

that meant his parents never got answers to their son's death?

...