done his best with them to secure a good life for his family and, from what Jules could see at the compound, for anyone who worked for him.
‘This is a lovely home, Pasang,’ she said quietly. ‘Shah … um, Narayan tells me you built it yourself.’
Pasang took Jules by the arm and patted her like a child.
‘No, no. We did not build this. We paid the men to build it. You are hungry? I have made food.’
‘That would be lovely,’ Jules answered.
A brief, whispered conversation followed between the former Gurkha and his wife as the three of them passed out of the greeting hall and into what looked like an open lounge or family room. They proceeded up a brushed-glass staircase, which took them through another entrance guarded by heavy mahogany doors and into the small crowd that had gathered out on the … gallery? The balcony? It was hard to say. White cotton drapery hung from the ceiling, swaying in a warm breeze and seeming to define a point at which the room flowed outside.
‘I must see to the guests,’ said Pasang. ‘And to something to eat for you.’
With that, she disappeared into the crowd, halting briefly to say hello to some of the people she passed.
Jules saw Birendra, and thought she recognised one of the men he was talking to. It looked like Thapa, who had also been with them on the massive super-yacht. Birendra waved when he saw her and the other man turned around. It was indeed Thapa. Shah had brought another of her old crew-mates with him to Darwin. It gave Jules pause. She had lost so many friends over the last few years. Fifi had had quite a crush on Thapa.
‘Over here is the man I wish you to meet, Miss Julianne,’ said Shah.
He guided her towards the buffet table. There, she spotted Piers Downing, picking at a pile of sticky blackened chicken wings and talking to a thickset, middle-aged man with iron-grey hair and the build of a rugby prop whose championship days were behind him, but not too far behind.
‘Ah, my junior has arrived,’ quipped Downing.
The lawyer was looking much less buttoned down than before, having discarded his suit for a pair of cream- coloured moleskin pants and a white cotton shirt that was more poolside bar than Old Bailey. More guests arrived as Shah introduced her to Downing’s companion.
‘Miss Julianne, this is Mr Pappas.’
‘Nick Pappas,’ the man added, as he held out his hand.
Jules returned his strong grip. Years of boat work, and more recently of hauling herself and bags of loot and weapons through some of the worst places in the world, had given her a stronger grip than many men. Nick Pappas, however, was possessed of giant bear paws, one of which could probably enfold both of her hands and crush them to bone splinters. She could feel a lot of restrained power idling at low throttle within his massive frame, but Pappas appeared to be one of those big men who had spent his life learning to be gentle.
‘Nick knows about our complications, ‘ said Shah. ‘In the past he has helped me out with similar problems. Business problems, not personal. But similar.’
Julianne thought she understood what he meant. She wondered about the people standing around out here, talking amiably, laughing and drinking Shah’s excellent wine and grazing on the food his wife and maybe his daughters had prepared. Were they all somehow connected to his business?
‘So how do you two know each other, if that’s not a little awkward?’ she asked.
Both men grinned. ‘Timor,’ they answered in unison, before Shah deferred to the Australian.
‘I was in the army, in those days,’ Pappas began.
‘SAS,’ prompted Shah.
Pappas gave him a look that said he was quite capable of doing his own bragging to the pretty girl, thank you very much. He continued. ‘We ran into each other outside a militia shithole called Los Palos. Gurkhas had long-range patrols encircling the place, as did we. The Indonesian battalion based there was raised locally. Timorese traitors. Not a good look for them once the Indons pulled out. Or for the pro-Jakarta gangs that were always hanging around like scabby dogs. We had the devil’s own job stopping them from killing every peasant within twenty miles. Still …’ - he dropped one meaty hand on the shoulder of his old comrade - ‘we did good. I looked up my little mate here as soon as I knew he was in Darwin. He tried to offer me a job, the cheeky bugger!’
The two ex-soldiers shared some private joke at that.
‘So you’re a security contractor, too, Nick?’ Jules asked.
‘No, not really. I do risk management now. A lot of assessment for the mining companies, the big migration agents, some work for the government along with some risk mitigation. Removing the sources of risk,’ he added, pausing to let her understand the import of the euphemism. ‘From what I hear, you could do with some help.’
Guests continued to arrive through the heavy wooden doors. A pleasant draft of chilled air wafted over her every time a newcomer entered the Shah family’s huge entertainment space. Jules estimated that maybe twenty- five or thirty people were here now, half of them locals, judging by their accents, most of the others neighbourhood people or possibly business contacts. Shah had told her that the majority of his neighbours were Chinese and Javanese exiles, and she’d already spotted more than a few of them in attendance. The Javanese made her uneasy. She had never been back to Indonesia after a crooked general had run them off a few months before the Wave.
‘It’s quite noisy up here,’ said Downing, who had been hovering at the edge of the conversation without saying anything. ‘Perhaps you could show us this wine cellar you’re so proud of, old boy? I’d be very interested to see it. I’ve had some diabolical difficulties convincing the local yokels that serving pinot noir at room temperature doesn’t mean serving it up like a goblet of hot blood.’
‘But of course,’ replied Shah. ‘You must come also, Nick. Perhaps we can teach you to drink something more than beer, now that you are a sophisticated businessman who no longer sleeps in his boots.’
‘Doubt it,’ he scoffed. ‘But do your worst.’
As instructed by their host, Jules abandoned her champagne flute there at the buffet table, which was so heavily laden with food, she had trouble finding a spot for the glass. She was hungry, starving actually, and grabbed a couple of small fishcakes before their small group made to leave. They tasted beautiful, still warm and springy, and spiced in a way she’d never come across before. Jules didn’t imagine that fishcakes featured heavily in the national cuisine of mountainous Nepal, but perhaps Pasang Shah had picked up the recipe while they’d been stationed in somewhere like Singapore.
Their home was decorated throughout with objets d’art, photographs and mementoes from all over the world. Shah seemed to have travelled even more extensively than her, although the Englishwoman was sure that if she asked, she’d find that every piece told the story of a posting with the Royal Gurkha Regiment. Even the construction of the house looked like it had been undertaken as an exercise in storing memories within architecture. They passed an internal garden she recognised as a common feature of many Arabic dwellings, while the formal dining space reminded her of tribal long rooms she had seen in Borneo. Nothing so gauche as crossed spears or shields hung from the walls here. It appeared to Julianne that the Shahs had spent a lot of time discussing the significant moments of their shared life with a very expensive architect. A life that had been spent in the service of a regiment that had dispatched them from one end of the world to the other.
Julianne had grown up around money, or in her family’s case, the memory and the carefully contrived appearance of money, and she recognised the real thing when she rubbed up against it. Shah had done very well for himself. She was happy for him.
The wine cellar was indeed a cellar, rather than merely a temperature- and atmosphere-controlled room crammed into a downstairs or underground living area as an afterthought. The four of them - Jules, the two old army pals and Shah’s lawyer, the displaced pantomime Englishman - proceeded in single file down a narrow staircase that doglegged back on itself before reaching a heavy steel door. This Shah opened by tapping a code into a wall-mounted keypad.
‘You must have some exceptionally good wine stored down here, my friend,’ Downing said.
‘I do,’ replied Shah. ‘To be truthful, I do not care for it myself. But then, I am the only man in the house, and I’m sure Miss Julianne will tell you that the ladies do enjoy a nice glass of wine.’
‘In a climate like this,’ Jules chimed in, ‘I can imagine I’d have a glass permanently in hand. Need to drink it fast, though. It would lose its chill very quickly.’
Hidden bolts clunked somewhere inside the heavy steel door before it whispered open at a touch. Soft lighting flickered on inside the cellar, dimly at first, before warming and brightening. As they trooped in, she saw immediately that Shah had built not just a wine cellar, but a safe room. Climate-controlled refrigeration units lined both main walls, with red wines marching away to the left and white wines to the right. In the centre of the room, a
