In 1993, a 21-year-old Akbar, having just finished his studies at the University of Cambridge, was installed by his father as the general manager of the Mermaid Theatre in London. Abdul had purchased the theatre from its founder, Bernard Miles, in 1983. Akbar, described by a Cambridge peer as a charming playboy who cultivated a “gangster” persona, embodied his family’s self-serving narrative that his father’s recent imprisonment had been a grave injustice. His big inaugural production was a one-man show about Muhammad Ali.

Akbar’s tenure at the Mermaid was a disaster that mirrored his father’s corrupt business style. The Muhammad Ali play quickly flopped. An investor in the show, a former boxer named Tony Breen, was never repaid the £35,000 he was owed and ultimately recovered only a fraction of it by takins some jewelry out of the theatre’s office. 

Marc Sinden, hired by Akbar as the theater’s artistic director, soon discovered that the Mermaid was systematically defrauding its partners and employees. The Shamjis ran the theater through a series of disposable shell companies—the Mermaid Theatre Company, then Comfortcall, then Quorumcrest. They would accumulate huge debts under one company name, refuse to pay suppliers, staff, or partner production companies, and then dissolve the entity to evade creditors before starting the cycle again with a new company. As the theater fell into disrepair with unpaid bills, Sinden realized the business was a scam, began cooperating with the police fraud squad, and was promptly fired. Shortly after, Akbar disappeared from London.

This chapter recounts Akbar’s police interrogation following his arrest on suspicion of Zac’s murder. On March 4, 2020, detectives questioned Akbar for a second time, confronting him with the lies and inconsistencies from his first interview. Akbar had previously omitted that after leaving the Riverwalk apartment building on the night of Zac’s death, he returned, went back up to the flat, and then walked to the riverbank to look into the water where Zac had fallen. Confronted with CCTV footage, he claimed it was a random smoke break and that the location was a coincidence.

In that first December interview, police had also established that Akbar lied about his final conversation with Zac. Akbar claimed to have shared a “collective hug” with both Zac and Verinder before leaving, but CCTV evidence proved that Zac had already gone over the balcony by the time Akbar returned to the apartment.

Detectives also revealed that Akbar had deleted a month’s worth of messages from his phone leading up to the day after Zac’s death. However, messages he had not deleted, along with messages recovered from Verinder’s phone, showed that Verinder was furious with Zac over failed financial “commitments.” Despite his evasiveness and lies, security footage provided Akbar with an alibi: He was not in the apartment at the moment Zac fell. The police shifted their questioning to a new subject, asking Akbar to identify “Mervin,” a man he was texting during the crisis.

The text flashes back to the early 2000s, detailing Akbar’s life in Los Angeles after he left London. His friend from Cambridge, Sanjiv Bhattacharya, recalled Akbar as a supremely confident and alluring figure who convinced him to move to LA to join his new record label, Soulife. Living in a Benedict Canyon mansion, Akbar had become involved with a label that had actually been established by two American producers, Mark Sparks and Chris Dawley, though one of Akbar’s friends, an older, wealthy actor named Peter Land, also claimed a co-founding role.

Sanjiv quickly realized that the venture was a chaotic and expensive failure. Akbar spent lavishly from his father’s fortune, used cocaine heavily, and adopted an affected hip-hop persona. The label produced only one hit song and was hemorrhaging money. After a visit from Akbar’s unimpressed father, the funding apparently dried up. Soulife imploded, and Akbar disappeared into what Sanjiv heard was a rehab program for cocaine addiction. Sanjiv, concluding his friend was a “great sham,” never spoke to him again.

The chapter returns to the police interrogation. “Mervin” is identified as Mervin Sealy, a friend from Akbar’s Soulife days who was in London the week Zac died. On the night of the incident, Akbar had been texting Mervin to acquire Adderall but became delayed at Riverwalk. In a series of shocking messages, Akbar revealed the dire situation inside the apartment, writing to Mervin, “I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood,” and “Shit’s about to go wrong. Wrong!” (147)

This chapter explores the theme of deception by drawing a parallel between Zac and his maternal grandfather, the celebrated rabbi and Holocaust survivor Hugo Gryn. Gryn, who died before Zac was born, was a revered public figure in Britain. After his death, however, his family discovered that a key element of his biography was a fabrication: He had never attended the University of Cambridge, as he had long claimed. Exercise books from the period showed he had attended Sir John Cass Technical Institute, a vocational school in London’s East End. This lie, likely told as a young, traumatized survivor to help him build a new life in the United Kingdom, mirrored his grandson’s own penchant for invention.

The text then details the extent of Zac’s deceptions, which his parents only uncovered after his death. At his boarding school, he told friends his mother was dead to gain sympathy and claimed his family was fabulously wealthy. He later adopted a series of personas, including that of a Russian gangster with temporary tattoos.

The most elaborate of these was the identity he presented to his neighbor, Zamira Ismailova. Zac had borrowed her surname for his “Ismailov” alter ego. She knew him as Thaimas, the 23-year-old son of a Kazakh oligarch whose mother had been killed in an accident. Their text messages revealed both his fantasies of wealth and his deep loneliness. For the Brettlers, grieving and trying to understand their son, the discoveries felt like assembling a “jigsaw in the dark” (160), and they realized that their son’s mind had been a “dangerous place.”

In the immediate aftermath of Zac’s death, his parents began navigating the official investigation while conducting their own inquiries. Rachelle identified Zac’s body at the mortuary, where she was forbidden from touching him to preserve forensic evidence. Shortly after, Matthew and Rachelle’s friend Jeannie visited the Riverwalk apartment building, where they saw a forensics team in hazmat suits on the fifth-floor balcony.

The Brettlers met with Detective Inspector Rory Wilkinson, who was leading the investigation and promised them a thorough inquiry that would leave “no unanswered questions.” Meanwhile, Matthew’s own research uncovered an important link: Through a public business database, he found that Verinder Kumar Sharma was a director of a company with a man named Barry Paul Lavers. Matthew knew of Lavers through a friend at his golf club. Lavers confirmed the connection, referred to Zac as “the oligarch’s son,” and revealed that a wealthy investor named Nick Gold paid for Verinder’s apartment.

The police shared two key pieces of evidence with the Brettlers. First, grainy footage from a camera at the MI6 building across the river showed Zac on the balcony alone for about a minute before he jumped, which seemed to rule out his being pushed. However, the initial autopsy report noted that Zac’s broken jaw was likely sustained before the fall. Second, contradicting Verinder’s claim that he was asleep when Zac left the apartment, the MI6 camera showed that at 2:46 am, after Zac had died and Akbar had come and gone from the flat, the lights inside Verinder’s apartment were turned off.

This chapter provides a detailed criminal history of Verinder, whose full name is Verinder Kumar Sharma, also known as “Indian Dave” or “the Little Fella.” His career began in London’s nightclub scene in the 1990s, where he and his partner, Andy Baker, ran security and extortion rackets. Verinder became known for his extreme violence and his association with some of London’s most dangerous criminals, including Gary “Tyson” Nelson, a murderer known as “the UK’s most dangerous man” (176).

In 2002, Verinder and his partner in a drug importation scheme, a Glaswegian bodybuilder named Dave “Muscles” King, had a falling out after a heroin shipment was intercepted. Verinder publicly accused Muscles of being a police informant. The feud escalated, and after police gave Verinder a formal Osman warning, a notice that his life was in danger, he fled to the South of France while facing trial for the kidnapping and torture of a nightclub owner.

From France, Verinder orchestrated a contract killing of Muscles, who was gunned down with an AK-47 variant as he and a friend were getting into a car outside his gym on October 3, 2003. Two hitmen were convicted of the murder. At trial, Barry Lavers, Verinder’s future business partner, appeared in court to provide Roger Vincent, one of the suspected shooters, with an alibi, as he had done for Vincent in a prior murder case. Verinder himself was never charged despite police acknowledging his role as the mastermind behind the murder. He eventually returned to London and continued his criminal activities with impunity. The chapter concludes by framing Zac’s death within this violent context, revealing text messages where an impatient Verinder told Akbar he wanted “5% of that 205 million” from Zac (192). Days before his death, a terrified Zac had searched online for “witness protection uk.” The chapter ends with a final twist: in December 2020, police informed Matthew that Verinder had been found dead.