This is a blog about fantasy. Zac Brettler was a fantasist. That is fundamentally what got him killed. He was 19 years old when he died in November 2019 having leapt from the fifth-floor balcony of a luxury apartment block, called Riverwalk, on the north side of the Thames just by Vauxhall Bridge. It is only known that he jumped rather than was pushed because the incident was captured by CCTV footage taken from the MI6 building on the opposite side of the river. But on the basis of Patrick Radden Keefe’s gripping and deeply unsettling book, London Falling, one might quite accurately suggest that, metaphorically, he was pushed.

During the last two years of his tragically short life, Zac made an extraordinary success of creating a false life for himself outsdie of his family. It was a precocity which was to prove fatal. Having assumed an identity as Zac Ismailov, he made out that he was the son of a recently deceased Russian oligarch who would soon inherit a £200-million fortune. He brought himself to the attention of Akbar Shamji, seemingly a successful businessman but in truth a bankrupt cryptocurrency investor. One of Zac’s ploys was to meet Shamji at One Hyde Park, a spectacularly ostentatious property, which led Shamji to believe he lived there. Which was Zac’s plan. In fact, he lived in Maida Vale with his parents, neither of whom had died or had £200 million to hand. When Zac died, he had £4 in his bank account.

In the course of his investigations, Keefe discovered that the owner of the Riverwalk apartment was a Saudi princess, who also owned a huge property on The Bishops Avenue – aka ‘Billionaires’ Row’ – in North London. (The UK newspapers intermittently publish stories about these mansions in Hampstead, which are invariably foreign-owned, usually unoccupied and often in a state of ruin, as shown in the photo on the home page.) Living in the flat in the autumn of 2019 was a man called Verinder Sharma, a business colleague of sorts of Shamji; also a gangster, an underworld enforcer. It was he who was in the flat with Zac when the latter first went on to the balcony and then went off it. In Keefe’s words: “Zac found himself trapped…Well aware of the man’s capacity for violence, he walked out to the balcony and leapt towards the safety of the Thames.” He made the Thames but not safety.

Zac’s parents, Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, eventually began to feel that the police had in fact soon lost interest in ascertaining what had gone on, perhaps because they knew that Zac had not been physically pushed off the balcony. Sharma is now dead, but Shamji is very much alive, and the evidence shows that he repeatedly lied to the police about his movements in the final couple of hours of Zac’s life. A story in the Sunday Times in May detailed how he had become domiciled in the Dominican Republic, a fact which is of no solace to the Brettlers. Matthew told the newspaper of Shamji, “he has subsequently sought to disassociate himself from involvement in Zac’s demise when in fact he was at its very epicentre”.

Among the blurbs on the back of the book is one from the broadcaster, Emily Maitlis. She writes: “Haunting, harrowing and rich with empathy, London Falling captures how easily a life can go wrong in the shadows of a city bankrolled by billionaires.” It does indeed do that. It is a wonderfully told story of crushing sadness.