by Leanne Ogasawara

1.

London Falling opens in late 2019 when nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler steps onto the balcony of a luxury apartment in London and jumps. The building sits directly across from Britain’s intelligence service MI6, which is how the Metropolitan Police came to have the surveillance footage of what happened.

The police suggested suicide. But Zac’s parents did not believe them. They do however acknowledge that there were some red flags about their son’s recent behavior. In the previous year, they tell the police, Zac had been spending quite a lot of time in the company of two older men. One of them, Verinder Sharma fifty-five, was allowing Zac to practically live with him in that luxury apartment across the river from MI6. The cameras showed that Sharma, also known as “Indian Dave,” was in the apartment when Zac jumped. But so was another older man named Akbar Shamji.

When Zac’s parents questioned their son about his relationship with these men, the teenager explained that they were successful businessmen and were mentoring him. Sounds strange and yet having a son about Zac’s age, who also studies business in university, I can imagine a similar scenario. Like Zac, my son is personable and enthusiastic to learn how businesses are run, so I can see him shadowing a friend’s father at work or playing golf with one of them. He does things like that already. But still, Zac’s parents were concerned about it—mainly because it was so much.

And anyway, what kind of businesses were these men running? Read more »