London Falling Part 2: The Truth - The Sunday Story

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: The Story — "London Falling Part 2: The Truth"

Date: April 12, 2026
Host: Gabriel Pogrent (The Times)
Guest: Patrick Radden Keefe (Author, investigative journalist)
Theme: Investigating the death of Zach Brettler, failures of the Metropolitan Police, and uncovering deeper truths behind the case as revealed in the book London Falling.

---

Episode Overview

This episode delves into the unresolved questions surrounding the death of 19-year-old Zach Brettler, who died after falling from a balcony in London in 2019. Building on Patrick Radden Keefe’s investigative reporting and Gabriel Pogrent’s follow-up work in The Sunday Times, the discussion explores substantial evidence mishandled by the police, possible involvement of organized crime, and the lasting impact on Zach’s family. The episode aims to lay bare both the personal and institutional failures that have obstructed justice and transparency in the case.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Revisiting the Brettler Case: Journalistic Inquiry

[01:05] Gabriel Pogrent:

• Recaps the suspicious circumstances of Zach Brettler’s death and the initial police investigation, which concluded suicide without thoroughly scrutinizing the two men present (Akbar Shamji and "Indian Dave").
• Details Pogrent’s own involvement after Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker article:

  “Unlike Patrick, I'm permanently based here in the UK... Would you like me to see if I can develop some of the lines of inquiry established in Patrick's piece?”

• Describes coming into possession of an Excel spreadsheet from the Metropolitan Police, containing technical data (vehicle movements) which the police did not analyze.

The Black Box: Crucial Evidence Overlooked

[05:55] Gabriel Pogrent:

• The spreadsheet contained tracking data for the car Akbar Shamji drove on the night of Zach’s death.
• Analysis revealed Shamji’s account was “totally false” — he did not go straight home, but instead drove erratically, kept contacting “Indian Dave,” and returned to the apartment just as Zach jumped.
• Police failed to question Shamji on these discrepancies;

  “He, at minimum, misled law enforcement, at worst, deliberately deceived them in order to minimize his role.”

Heated Knives and Unexplained Evidence

[10:25] Patrick Radden Keefe:

• Praises the investigative work by journalists that the police failed to do, despite having access to the evidence.
• Focuses on the suspicious text message from Shamji:

  “He said to this guy… he wasn’t able to meet up, and he said, ‘I'm heating up knives and clearing up blood.’”

• Shamji’s explanations at inquest were “almost comical,” including:

  “When I said, I'm clearing up blood, I didn't mean... blood, as in out of your vein. He said, blood is like a way of saying, bro.”

• Crucially, Zach’s last internet search was “what to do with skin burns,” suggesting intimidation involving a heated knife — a technique confirmed by associates of “Indian Dave.”

The Role of “Indian Dave” — Informant Allegations

[17:05] Gabriel Pogrent & [18:20] Patrick Radden Keefe:

• Discusses police incuriosity about "Indian Dave" (Verinder Sharma) and the wider underworld context.
• Former police detective Dave McKelvey indicates “Indian Dave” was known as a prolific police informant, although later tries to walk this back, sowing doubt about his direct involvement but not dismissing the strong possibility of a covert police relationship.
• Despite being connected to serious criminal cases (including an AK-47 shooting), “Indian Dave” evaded prison for decades, a fact several sources tie to informant status:

  “That's one way in which the really sophisticated gangsters do it. They work out early on that if you have connections in the police, it helps.” — Keefe [19:53]

Hopes for Consequences and the Limits of Journalism

[20:38] Patrick Radden Keefe:

• Keefe reflects on the personal connection and trust developed with the Brettler family.
• Hopes for a reopened investigation or at least police acknowledgment of failings:

  “The Met police would reopen the investigation or at least give an acknowledgment that they have fallen extremely short in this case.” [21:17]

• Sees value in documenting the truth even when legal accountability is elusive, paralleling his work on the Sackler family:

  “It's not accountability in a legal sense, but... to pin the truth down in a way that is kind of unassailable and will endure, has a value by itself.”

Systemic Issues in UK Policing and “Londonization”

[24:55] Patrick Radden Keefe:

• Discusses British and global aspects of the story — London’s unique culture as a “stage for reinvention” and the interplay of international financial and criminal influences:

  “I think there are distinctly British aspects of this … before the Russians came in the early aughts, it was the Americans. … There are ways in which England has become more like America and ways in which America may be becoming more like England.”

• Rejects the notion of detached critique, highlighting shared vulnerabilities for all families.

---

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “[The car’s data] drove a coach and horses through Shamji’s own account of what took place on the night… He, at minimum, misled law enforcement, at worst, deliberately deceived them in order to minimize his role.”
  — Gabriel Pogrent [07:38]

• “To me, that is the explanation really, of what happened, is that Zach thought that if he stayed in that apartment, that was the... that was what would become of him. And so I think he jumped not to die, but to live.”
  — Patrick Radden Keefe [14:20]

• “[The Met] have never apologized. … Every angle of investigation was thoroughly pursued — there's always sort of a little bit of... a pat on their own back, which to me, just feels kind of starkly at odds with the reality.”
  — Patrick Radden Keefe [21:17]

• “If this is how they examine the death of Zach, how on earth can we have confidence in them investigating people with improbable connections ... or journalists in the UK?”
  — Gabriel Pogrent [23:28]

---

Important Timestamps

• [01:05] – Recap of case, Gabriel Pogrent’s entry to the investigation
• [05:55] – Discovery and implications of car tracking data
• [10:25] – Keefe discusses the meaning of “heating up knives”
• [14:20] – Keefe’s thesis: Zach’s jump as an act of desperation
• [18:20] – Informant allegations against “Indian Dave”
• [20:38] – Keefe’s hopes and journalism’s impact
• [24:55] – Reflections on London, policing, and cross-cultural issues

---

Updates and Whereabouts

• Indian Dave (Verinder Sharma):
  Died in 2020 of apparent overdose in same flat where Zach died. Before death, told a paramedic he was under police pressure as an informant.
• Akbar Shamji:
  Moved to the US after the incident; current whereabouts unknown.
• Metropolitan Police:
  Maintains that all procedures were followed and every hypothesis explored; no formal apology or case reopening.

---

Conclusion

This episode uncovers grave institutional failings in the investigation of Zach Brettler’s death and highlights the vital role of determined investigative journalism in exposing uncomfortable truths. The discussion is a poignant commentary on justice, accountability, and the ongoing struggles faced by bereaved families when powerful systems resist transparency.

---

Transcript

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

A Better Help ad.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

Hold on one second.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

I just need to.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

What if you had a room where no one interrupts? No notifications, no expectations, just space to talk with.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

BetterHelp therapy happens in a space that's yours. Visit betterhelp.com randompodcast for 10% off your first month of online therapy. Not every sale happens at the register. Before AT&T business Wireless checking out customers on our mobile POS systems took too long. Basically a staring contest where everyone loses. It's crazy what people will say during an awkward silence. Now transactions are done before the silence takes hold. That means I can focus on the

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

task at hand and make an extra sale or two.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Sometimes I do miss the bonding time.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Sometimes AT&T business Wireless Connecting changes everything.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

From the Times and Sunday Times, this is the Story. I'm Gabriel Pogrent. On the story this weekend. We've been following the case of Zach Brettler, a 19 year old boy who jumped to his death from a balcony in London in 2019. We've looked at the way his death was treated as though a suicide, and how the Metropolitan Police failed to secure charges against the two men involved, and how the preeminent author and investigative reporter Patrick Radden Keith dismantled their methodology. In his New York article, which is now the subject of his latest book, London Falling, he exposed failings that call into question, if not the police's verdict on the case, then certainly the basis on which they had arrived at is. Now that I come into the story, I knew Zach and his family and after Patrick's article I asked if they might benefit from a UK based journalist who might be able to get some answers out of local law enforcement and other authorities. So in 2024 their son's death became the subject of a report in the Sunday Times which, fused with Patrick's original findings, uncovered further questions of the Metropolitan Police. Those are questions we'll address in today's episode, questions the police have failed to answer at any point. Who were the two other men in the apartment at the time of Zach's death? They were men who had criminal connections. And why did police ignore key evidence that a suspect had lied about his every move that night? It's some of the most disturbing police incompetence I've witnessed and if you haven't listened to yesterday's episode, please go ahead and catch up. The story today London Falling what really Happened to Zach Brettler Part 2 the Truth I suppose where I happened to come into the story was you had produced your opus in the New Yorker and I contacted the Brettler family and didn't want to be presumptuous because your work was the result of months of inquiry. And I didn't want to attempt to reduce that to something which only repeated what you had discovered. But I essentially said to them, unlike Patrick, I'm permanently based here in the uk. I happen to do a fair amount of reporting, most of it fairly disobliging and hopefully useful about law enforcement. Would you like me to see if I can develop some of the lines of inquiry established in Patrick's piece? I met Matthew and I met Rochelle. I spoke to them both. They gave me their blessing to look further into some of this. One resource, one piece of evidence that I felt really demanded further examination, was a spreadsheet, which I believe the police inadvertently sent to the Brettlers. And it was a spreadsheet, a Excel spreadsheet containing numbers, which, to an outside observer would have been utterly indecipherable. And I could tell you they were certainly indecipherable to me at the outset. But it was in actual fact, the data contained within a tracking device which was fitted in the interior of a rental vehicle that Akbar Shamji just happened to be driving on the night of Zach's death. There were coordinates like latitude and longitude, but also specialist metrics, which would have only meant something to people who are experts in the hardware and software in question, but which, for instance, looked at things like acceleration and the speed of the vehicle in a given moment, whether it was idling, whether it was moving, whether it had actually parked, kind of real richness and multitude of information which, shockingly, I learned the Metropolitan Police had not bothered to properly look at. Well, we did. What it did was it drove a coach and horses through Shamji's own account of what took place on the night, an account which he provided under penalty of perjury to the police. It was his contention that he had left Riverwalk and immediately returned home before Zach's death. He said that he saw fit to leave and Dave and Zach remained up on the fifth floor, and that was that he went back to Mayfair. That was totally false. The facts actually revealed that he had left the apartment, got in the vehicle, driven around the back streets of Pimlico, sort of pirouetting and weaving between streets and ways which didn't make that much immediate sense, while actually repeatedly trying to contact Indian Dave. And then there came a point where he might have been heading home, but he gets on a call with Indian Dave and at that point his trajectory changes. He speeds well over the speed limit, surging past Bucking palace, down the Mall to Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall and then Millbank and back to the apartment. He's on the phone with Indian Dave for about nine minutes. He arrives just as Zach is leaping off the balcony. And he then spends time, we have since learned, peering over the Thames path and the Barrier into the river where Zaka jumped. He goes round the area at the bottom of the development and then gets back in the car. He drives around town, lingers on Edgware Road for some time, possibly even naps for a period, and only in the very early hours, briefly goes home. So it was a complete contradiction and an inversion of the highest order of what he claimed took place. And we felt that that had to be at the heart of the police's questions to him. He, at minimum, misled law enforcement, at worst, deliberately deceived them in order to minimize his role. And we were able to illustrate in a kind of pretty innovative way the movement of the car in those key moments. And that was the centerpiece of our story and. And it was our way of putting up in bright light some of the Metropolitan Police's failings. And I think one of the great shames of the way the police conduct themselves is that they never pressed him on that matter. With me today, Ms. Patrick Rudding Keefe, something they also didn't do, and this is where we get into the domain of conspiracy, is they did not, it seems, subject Indian Dave to particularly vigorous scrutiny, nor examine the meaning of some of the texts between Dave and Shamji on the night. And I want to talk about what you have achieved in your book here, because the world of organized crime is a bit of a black box here, and the pendulum has swung quite far away from the world world in which journalists had deep sources in the policing worlds and crime worlds. But what you've managed to do is two things. Firstly, I think you've decoded this vital text between Shamji and Dave, or Shamji and a friend, rather, in which she says, we've been heating up knives. I myself didn't know whether that was like the vernacular of the criminal world or slang that I wasn't familiar with. I wondered, number one, if you could outline what that meant and what you think it says about the events that preceded Zack's jump. And number two, you speculated about this in your original story, but you have gone so much further now in unraveling whether Indian Dave was a police informant and whether that might have frustrated the investigation. So it'd be Great. If you could take those in turn.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I think the first thing I would say is the investigation that you. That you guys did in the Sunday Times is extraordinary. But. But it actually is of a piece with the story I'm about to tell in the sense that I think a lot of the time as a journalist, and I've written a lot about crime and law enforcement and so forth over the years, you're sort of drafting on the investigators in law enforcement in the sense that they have power that you don't. They can compel people to come in for questioning, they can arrest people, they can subpoena documents and so on and so forth.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

And.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And this is one of these strange stories where the journalists are the ones doing the legwork that was right there for the cops to do. So in your case, you did that analysis on the car and worked out exactly Akbar's movements, but that data had actually been in the possession of the police. So the kind of level of exploitation

[Gabriel Pogrent]

they produced, one page about it, they didn't examine it at all, and they

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

didn't use it as leverage. In their many interviews with Akbar, when he's lying to them about his movements, at no point did they say, well, hang on a second, you're telling us one story, but the tracker on your car tells us another. And this was a similar situation where the police had obtained text messages and found that on the night that Zach died, when Akbar Shamji was in the apartment with Zach and Indian Dave, he was texting with a friend of his who happened to be in London and who he had plans to meet up with. And he said to this guy, at a certain point, he wasn't able to meet up, and he said, I'm heating up knives and clearing up blood. And Akbar was asked about this text by the police, and he sort of said, oh, I don't. You know, I don't even know. We, you know, I'd had a few drinks. Who knows what I was talking about? He was actually subsequently asked in the inquest about this, and his answer was almost comical. He had no explanation for heating up knives. He said, oh, there weren't any knives. And he said, when I said, I'm clearing up blood, I didn't mean to suggest that there was blood, as in out of your vein. He said, blood is like a way of saying, bro. So I was actually saying, I'm just cleaning. I'm cleaning up blood. To me, just kind of a ludicrous explanation of this. Matthew and Michelle Brettler said, hey, did you ever. To the Police, did you ever contact the guy who Akbar was having those texts with? You have his phone number. His name is Mervyn Seeley. And the police said no. And it's interesting. Matthew actually suggested to them, I think it would be good to talk to him to find out what did he think Akbar was talking about. And kind of stubbornly, this. This police investigator Rory Wilkinson says, and this is all recorded. I have the tape. He says, oh, but he doesn't know. It's not. He has nothing to do with this. Why would we bother contacting that guy? So I did track down Mervyn, and he didn't want to talk with me. But I was really interested in this idea of heating up knives and what that might have meant, particularly because we also know that minutes before he died, the last thing Zach looked for on the Internet was he did a search for what to do with skin burns. To me, these two details, when you connect them, Akbar saying, I'm heating up knives, Zach Googling, what do you do about skin burns? Feel pretty suggestive. So what did the police say to this? The police said, the trouble is, when we recovered Zach's body, he didn't have any burn marks on his body. Therefore, there's nothing to see here. So I was tracking down people who knew Indian Dave and had been intimate with him in his life. And I was making a lot of phone calls, and a lot of people didn't want to talk to me. But clearly, word was getting around that I was calling around. And I ended up hearing from somebody who was a longtime associate of his who knew him very well, I should say, not somebody I had even been aware of. I didn't reach out to them. They got word that I was calling around, and they got in touch with me, and we ended up talking a lot, and they told me many things about him. But casually, at one point, this person said, oh, you know, Dave's favorite technique was heating up the knife. And I said, well, what does that mean? And he said, when you wanted to get something from someone, he would heat up a knife over a stove. And sometimes what would happen is he would actually approach the person and touch the hot knife to them. But he said, most of the time, you didn't even need to do that. If you just heated up the knife in front of them in a kind of theatrical way, they would tell you whatever you wanted to know. And to me, that is the explanation really, of what happened, is that that Zach thought that if he stayed in that apartment, that was the. That was what would become of him. And so I think he jumped not to die, but to live.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

Coming up, was Indian Dave really who he said he was? And where are both men now? And what do the Brettlers and indeed Patrick wish to happen as a result of this remarkable book? We'll have more in a moment.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Foreign.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Hi, this is Farnoosh Tarabi from so Money with Farnoosh Tarabi and today I want to talk to you about Boost Mobile Quick Money Tip Stop Paying a Carrier Tax if your phone bill feels trapped in a pricey plan, this is your sign to Unlock savings. Boost Mobile helps you reset your spending with the $25 Unlimited Forever plan. You can bring your own phone, pay $25 and get unlimited wireless forever. And that simple switch can unlock up to $600 in savings a year. That's money you could put towards paying down debt, investing or something that actually brings you joy. Those savings are based on average annual single line payment of AT&T Verizon and T Mobile customers compared to 12 months on the Boost Mobile Unlimited plan as of January 2026. For full offer details, visit boostmobile.com taking care of your eyes shouldn't be a hassle. That's why Warby Parker is a one stop shop for all your vision needs. Our prescription glasses and sunglasses are expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable. Stop by a nearby store or use our app to virtually try on frames and get personalized recommendations. Did we mention we offer eye exams and take vision insurance too? For everything you need to see, head to your nearest Warby Parker store or visit warbyparker.com today.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

That's warbyparker.com from globalization to innovation sustainability to market volatility, there's always more than

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

one side to a story.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

Explore different perspectives on today's most important business and economic issues with the Flipside Podcast from Barclays Investment Bank. Hear two research analysts in a lively debate and get insights from every angle to further inform your view. Listen to the flip side on your favorite platform. And then you on the topic of Dave, heard from a former cop, a guy called Dave McKelvey, and he just said something out loud, which I think when you look at the incuriousness of the police, even by this sadly low standards of Scotland Yard, it does seem like there's something missing. And I the bit of the book that kind of took my breath away was where you revealed you had actually heard from somebody who had said Indian Dave was an informant or a source for law enforcement.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, and I should say, and this is somebody I got in contact with the thing that was interesting about it is that I didn't tell him. I didn't frame my inquiry at all. I just said, I'm trying to find out about this guy. He was a criminal. He's very much on the radar of Scotland Yard for many years. His name was Verinder Sharma. He went by Indian Dave. And this guy McKelvey's first response was, oh, Indian Dave. I remember an Indian Dave. Yeah. There used to be an Indian Dave who was a player police informant, a very prolific police informant, I should say. There's then a whole kind of aftermath where he tried to sort of reel it back in afterwards, and he said that comically, the guy who he said was Indian Dave's handler was a different cop named Chris Cubitt. He said, yeah, Chris Cubitt was the handler, what have you. And I said, well, can I speak to Cubitt? And he reached out to Cubitt and then he came back to me and he said, oh, you know, it was all a big mistake. There was a second Indian Dave.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

There was another massive gangster in the drugs trade who was a police informant called Indian Dave.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

It was known as Indian Dave. And I should say I have never encountered the notion of there being two Indian Daves. And then to further complicate it, when I finally spoke to Cubit, he said, I've never known a Verindian Verinder or an Indian Dave, either of them. I suppose so, yeah. I think that there's a. There's a very decent chance that there was something going on behind the scenes in terms of some involvement between India and Dave and the authorities. And I should also say this is a guy who stayed out of prison for decades, which most of his contemporaries did not. And what I've been told by multiple people is that's one way in which the really sophisticated gangsters do it. They work out early on that if you have connections in the police, it helps.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

Yes. And you go into this in the book, but obviously he left the country after being told there was a credible threat to his life, fled to France, and while connected to the AK47 assassination, was somehow able to re enter the country, and the arrest warrant on him had been withdrawn. So do you have hopes in terms of what the book could do? Are there consequences that you hope for? You think that are within reach? And for you, is this story over, or is this where your relationship with it ends? What's the outcome that you're kind of optimistically hoping for? Having expended so much incredible effort and resource unraveling the story?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, I don't know that there's just one. I developed what, for me was a really extraordinary relationship with this family, with Rachelle and Matthew and Jo. They placed an enormous amount of trust in me. And I think that they were very clear eyed. And I should say I was quite transparent with them from the outset. I'm not their advocate. You know, I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a PR person. The job that I had to do was to tell a story that was kind of thorough and true as much as I. It's a very intimate book, and I developed, I think, quite an intimate relationship with the family. I think in a perfect world, the Met police would reopen the investigation or at least give an acknowledgment that they have fallen extremely short in this case.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

They've never apologized, have they?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

They've never apologized. And indeed, the statements that they've been willing to give and they did not cooperate with this book in any way always take the form of, you know, of course we feel terrible compassion for the Brettler family and what a. What a dreadful loss and so forth. They always sort of start. They lead with compassion, and then they say every angle of investigation was thoroughly pursued. There's always sort of a little bit of. It always kind of ends with a. With a. A pat on their own back, which to me, just feels kind of starkly at odds with the reality. And so I think either a reopening, which has happened, I should say, in other cases, there are many long running cases that are difficult for thorny investigations that have been reopened by the police and reexamined. I think some kind of a acknowledgement by them would mean a lot to the family. But then more broadly, I wrote a book about the Sackler family Empire of Pain. And, you know, the Sacklers were never really held legally to account for what they did. But I think that there sometimes is a value to the kind of work that you and I do, where you can put the truth between the pages of a book or in the pages of a newspaper. And it has a value. It's not accountability in a legal sense, but I do think that in a story that is so shot through with different lies, to pin the truth down in a way that is kind of unassailable and will endure has a value by itself. And my hope is that for the Brettlers, that becomes a story about the extraordinary lengths that they went to, I think, to honor their son's mem in trying to figure out what happened to him. And In a strange way, I think that there are aspects, as much as Zack's story is very specific, in particular, there are aspects of this story that a lot of people relate to. I mean, I'm a parent of two adolescent sons, and there are aspects of what the Brettlers went through that I relate to very strongly. And so I guess that would be my last hope, is that some people are able to find something instructive or redeeming about the story that may be helpful as they think through the kind of lesser dilemmas that many of us encounter as parents and children.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

Yeah, I do think that the way the book kind of forensically exhibits the failings, I think is one of its most important achievements of it, in that you cannot read this now and escape the conclusion that at best, their son's death was not adequately investigated. And. And I think that matters. And it matters for the other reason you outlined, which is, if this is how they examine the death of Zach, how on earth can we have confidence in them investigating people with improbable connections to Patrick Radden Keefe or. Or journalists in the uk? Last question. Patrick, you've been most generous for your time, and I'm grateful for it. This actually relates to events which took place now coming up to, well, seven years ago, the best part of a decade ago. And so obviously, in the course of your reporting, you've probably learned a lot about law enforcement in its current state in the uk. But I just wanted to lastly ask. You have this semi detached relationship with the uk, what portrait do you feel emerges from this story? Is it a kind of story you witness in America, or is this a very particular and British tale as you perceive it in terms of the context in which this story was able to unfold?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

The book is in some ways very critical of London, but it's also written from a place of great love. Right. This is a place that I've spent a lot of time in my life and that I will keep coming back to.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

We've not put you off?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

No, no, no. On the contrary. No. I think part of what's fascinating is I wouldn't pin. On the one hand, I think there are distinctly British aspects of this and there's a whole element of the story we haven't talked about, about the kind of family histories of these three men and the idea of London as a kind of great stage for personal reinvention in which people come from other parts of the world and find themselves in London and make a new life. The history of the British Empire threads through this in kind of interesting ways, having said all that, before the Russians came in the early aughts, it was the Americans. I mean, really, the story sort of starts in terms of London's transformation in 1987 with the deregulation of the banking sector by Margaret Thatcher and the kind of hordes of Americans coming in. Yeah. And as we speak, Donald Trump is talking about introducing his own Golden Visa program along the lines of what the UK had. And so there are ways in which I think some parts of this story, there are ways in which England has become more like America and ways in which America may be becoming more like England. So I don't mean to suggest by any stretch that, I mean, I'm coming to you from the kind of debased and Corrupt America of 2026. There's no sense whatsoever of the kind of judgment of an outsider who says, oh, that could never happen here. It's more, I think in the case of the Brettler family, you know, there but for the grace of God go any of us, you know.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

Well, Patrick, on that note, thank you so much. I implore you to. To buy the book, to read it from front to cover because it is gripping, spellbinding and kind of irresistible. Yeah. Thank you, Patrick, for this amazing curtain raiser and good luck with the book.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Thank you.

[Gabriel Pogrent]

That was Patrick Rudden. Keefe. You can buy his book London Falling at the Times Bookshop online. You can also read my original investigation online at the Times. Search for the dead teenager, the lying suspect and the black box that proves it. We'll put a link in the show notes, I should say, bringing us up to the present day. Indian Dave actually died in 2020 from an apparent drug overdose in the very flat from which Zach jumped to his death. Before Indian Dave passed away, he told a paramedic that he was under pressure as he was helping the police inquiries surrounding a murder case. It's claimed he said it was the first time he had ever taken an overdose and the reason was that his children had abandoned him. He's quoted as saying, I've not been able to make contact with him for the last few months. Life is not worth living when they're not in my life. Meanwhile, Alpal Shamji. Well, according to New Yorker, he moved to the US following the incident, but his specific location at this time remains unknown. I've repeatedly approached Akbar Shanji for comment and repeatedly heard nothing. The Met police expressed sincere condolences with Zach Brettler's family. They said that when an unexpected death happens, there are policing protocols to follow, and the investigation into Zach's death was led by an experienced detective. They added that the team worked hard to explore every possible hypothesis and that the case was also reviewed by specialist homicide detectives to ensure every line of inquiry had been exhausted. The producer and sound designer was Dave Creasy. The executive producer was Kate Ford. I'm Gabriel Pogrand. This story will be back as usual tomorrow. Thank you for listening. Foreign.

[Farnoosh Tarabi]

Hi, this is Farnoosh Tarabi from Sew Money with Farnoosh Tarabi, and today I want to talk to you about Boost Mobile Quick Money Tip Stop Paying a Carrier Tax if your phone bill feels trapped in a pricey plan, this is your sign to Unlock Savings. Boost Mobile helps you reset your spending with the $25 Unlimited Forever plan. You can bring your own phone, pay $25 and get unlimited Wireless forever, and that simple switch can unlock up to $600 in savings a year. That's money you could put towards paying down debt, investing or something that actually brings you joy. Those savings are based on average annual single line payment of AT&T, Verizon and T Mobile customers, compared to 12 months on the Boost Mobile Unlimited plan as of January 2026. For full offer details, visit boostmobile.com if

[Gabriel Pogrent]

you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-granger. Visit granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.