Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Eighth Judge

The novel changes key here, because this is the chapter with a victim who is twenty-one years old and did nothing at all except win.

Manshika Prasad was an Indo-Fijian woman from a working family who had prepared for that stage for two years. She was articulate. She was good in an interview. She was, by every account including the accounts of people who wanted somebody else to win, the strongest competitor in the room on the night.

She won with four of seven judges' votes.

Four of seven. A majority. Not a technicality, not a countback — a clean win. Announced. Crowned. Photographed. Celebrated. Carried by the wires.

Two days later the result was reversed.

The licensee announced that there had been an eighth judge.

Not a replacement. Not a tiebreaker — there was no tie. An eighth judge whose existence had not been announced before the event, who was not introduced on the night, who was not listed anywhere, who had not been present, and whose vote was said to be determining.

And that vote crowned Nadine Roberts — who is married to Jamie McIntyre.

The licensee was Lux Projects, which offers luxury property developments, and which the ABC reported is linked to a man named Jamie McIntyre — a former Australian-based property developer now banned from conducting business in Australia — before adding, with a dryness that must have been deeply satisfying to write:

And here's the kicker: Mr McIntyre is married to Nadine Roberts.

The judges

The BBC did the thing that had never once been done properly in twenty-five years.

They rang the judges.

Every regulator that had ever looked at Jamie McIntyre had looked at documents. The Senate looked at a witness. The Federal Court looked at schemes. Deloitte looked at ledgers.

And a man who had spent his entire life exploiting the gap between the presentation and the substance had survived all of it, because documents can be layered and witnesses can be evasive and ledgers can be emptied.

The BBC rang the humans.

And the humans said, one after another, the same thing: they had never been told an eighth judge existed. It wasn't on the website. It wasn't anywhere.

And — the question that a whole life collapses into —

how can you vote on a contest if you're not even there?

McIntyre's representatives insisted that allegations of his involvement in the judging controversy were a conspiracy theory, while conceding that he had provided advice to the licence holder. The BBC understood that a "Jamie" had been on the line during phone calls between Ms Roberts and the event organiser. The company's Instagram featured a video of Mr McIntyre giving property investment advice, and a link to a Bali-based property company he owned.

And the allegation that the organiser had pressured the panel to choose Ms Prasad because of her race was undermined by a fact of magnificent, stupid simplicity:

the organiser is understood to have voted for Ms Roberts.

Read that again.

They accused a man of racially rigging a vote against Nadine Roberts.

He had voted for Nadine Roberts.

That is not the error of a criminal mastermind.

That is the error of a man who has never once in his life had to make a story survive contact with a fact-checker — because for twenty-five years he had operated in a country where the check came ten years late, or never.

The smear

When the judges began talking, the counter-attack did not go after the judges.

It went after the winner. And it went after her on the grounds of her ancestry.

Fiji has a wound. This novel is not going to pretend to explain it in a paragraph; it runs through a coup and a constitution and a hundred and forty years of indenture and land tenure and the question of who is vulagi in a country where your great-great-grandfather arrived in a ship.

To reach into that, deliberately, as a public-relations instrument, in order to protect a beauty title, is a thing of a different order to selling a man in Rockhampton an ATM that does not exist.

And you can trace the lineage of the technique through every chapter of this book.

When Kaye's empire collapsed: I was the education side. When ASIC came: the regulator is incompetent. When Fairfax reported: the mainstream media has a vested interest. When the AEC deregistered: gross incompetence, we'll sue. When the boat was on the beach: an overseas syndicate owns it.

Always the same instrument, reached for without thought, the way you reach for a light switch in your own house in the dark:

Find the biggest available grievance in the room, and stand behind it.

In Melbourne in 2009 the available grievance was the banks.

In Canberra in 2013 it was the major parties.

In 2020 it was mandates.

And in Fiji in 2024 the available grievance was race — and a twenty-one-year-old woman who had won four votes out of seven found her ancestry on the front page of an argument she had never entered.

Her mother said one thing in an interview, and this book will put it down and leave it alone:

"She worked for two years. Two days she was Miss Fiji. Two days."

The reversal

The Miss Universe Organisation investigated.

The title was stripped from Roberts and Prasad was reinstated.

The appeal was lost.

And that is the singular fact about this chapter, and the reason it sits where it does in the architecture of the novel:

the deception was documented in real time, and the outcome was reversed.

Nothing else in twenty-five years was reversed.

Marion Dalgety did not get her forty thousand back.

Trevor Aylwood did not get his mother's inheritance back.

Dave Prentice did not get three hundred thousand back.

The hundred and fifty-two families did not get the seven million back; the liquidators could not even locate it.

Thirteen creditors of a liquidated education company recovered nothing.

The childcare woman in Joondalup never even filed.

One time — one time, over a quarter of a century, across five countries — an institution with a spine and a functioning process looked at what Jamie McIntyre had done, and undid it, and gave the thing back to the person it had been taken from.

It was a beauty pageant.

That is either the most hopeful sentence in this book or the most damning one, and the novel declines to decide.

The laptop

A final scene, and it is small.

The BBC piece is on the screen and has been for some time.

Nadine is somewhere else in the house. They have not spoken about it in two days, and the public position — that they had been separated for over a year, that his association with the licensee had no bearing on the outcome — now exists in the world and cannot be unsaid, whatever the truth of it is.

Jamie McIntyre reads to the end and scrolls back to the top and reads it again, the way you press a bruise.

And the sentence he keeps returning to is not banned from conducting business. It is not conspiracy theory. It is not any of the ones about him at all.

It is a judge, quoted, saying:

how can you vote on a contest if you're not even there?

Because he had built his whole life out of being the eighth judge.

The vote that was never announced. The name on nothing. The presence that could not be located. Simply a shareholder in an associated company. Not the licensee. Not the owner of the boat. Not the operator of the scheme — the education side.

Always the determining influence that does not appear on the panel.

And the BBC had just explained to eleven million people, in one sentence, that this is not a clever position.

It is simply a description of a man who is not in the room where the thing happens, and never has been, and therefore cannot be given credit for anything, ever, including his own life.