by Lee, M
JULIE
About 6 o’clock in the morning my time, I got a call from Marcus. He said, ‘I’m with these nice gentlemen here . . .’ in this awful tight voice that I knew meant they weren’t nice, and something bad was happening and he couldn’t talk freely. ‘They’re asking me some questions about a property deal,’ he said. He sounded angry but also scared. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but as much as I wanted to ask him questions, I could tell I just needed to listen.
He said, ‘What they want to do is they want to come to the villa. I’ve told them we’ve got dogs and they don’t want to see the dogs. Can you get the dogs out of the house?’
I said OK and started to say everything would be all right, but I could only tell him I loved him before he said, ‘I’m going to have to go. These nice gentlemen are going to drive me to the villa now.’
Nice gentlemen!
As soon as he hung up I called Justin, who lived the closest to us. I was in tears as I said, ‘Justin, something’s happened to Marcus. I don’t know who he’s with but they’re coming around to the villa. You need to get Dudley and Indrani out of there.’
Instantly he said, ‘Yep, don’t worry, everything will be fine, Jules. It will be fine.’
He jumped straight in his car, drove around to our place and told Indrani she needed to come with him right away. She freaked out. Dealing with Dubai authorities is stressful at the best of times for non-western foreign workers with few rights. An urgent drama in the middle of the night was too much for her.
Justin got her and Dudley out into the car. He had a quick look-around, considered whether he should take our computer with him and decided against it on the basis that would only increase whatever suspicions the authorities had. He drove back to his place, which was higher on the hill and looked down over our villa, and he, Jackie and Indrani waited to see what would happen next.
MARCUS
After my phone call, we went back down to the car. The other vehicles — also unmarked four-wheel drives with blacked out windows, and portable blue police lights now flashing on their roofs — were lined up in front and behind our car, making a convoy. It looked like something you’d imagine the CIA using for a captured high-level terrorist.
I gave directions and we drove to our home. More police and other official cars were there waiting for us. Saying that I needed to go first to make sure the dogs had been removed, I let myself in, calling, ‘Dudley, Dudley.’ It was obvious neither he nor Indrani were there. Passing back through the kitchen I spotted a Post-it note on the kitchen bench: ‘D at J’. Good, Dudley was at Justin’s and I guessed Indrani would be there too.
For the next hour or more the men went through all our personal files, papers and belongings. They removed the file with details about the purchase of our Birchgrove property and our Australian tax records. With great delight one of the younger men looking through our papers called out to the others that he had found a bank statement in US dollars from a bank in Jersey. He rushed to show it to his superior. Part of my brain was going back over everything I knew about the D17 Sunland purchase they had been so interested in, trying to figure out what might have triggered their interest. Another part registered that nobody here seemed on top of property or financial matters. A Jersey bank account was a common, ordinary thing among expats.
I still thought that when they realised their mistake this whole strange incident would be over. As they packed up the last of the documents and other things they were taking I said hopefully to the one who seemed to be in charge, ‘So that’s it? Can I stay now?’
‘No’ he said. ‘Come’. And we went back out to the car again.
JULIE
Justin and Jackie were able to see everything that happened — all the cars pulling up, Marcus getting out, and lights going on and off in the various rooms as the police searched. When they left, after 7 in the morning my time, Justin rang and told me what he’d seen. I was frantic with worry, my whole body was shaking. Over in Dubai we’d all heard stories and rumours about police torturing people and people being taken out to the desert and never being seen again. I kept thinking of horrible scenarios and wanted desperately to tell my family, but I had to keep it together. This was Mum’s big day. In a few hours the entire extended family, including Marcus’s parents, Carol, and terminally ill Allan, would gather for a party that had been in the works for months.
My niece Leanne was also staying at Mum’s. As she came out of her room my lack of sleep overtook my resolve to not say anything. I said, ‘Leanne, I have to tell you something but you can’t tell anybody.’ I quickly told her all that I knew and she gave me an enormous hug. We looked at each other, speechless, hugged again, then I took some deep breaths and we went in to say good morning to Mum.
Whenever I could get a few minutes that morning I’d duck into my room and check both the phones. People in Dubai and in Australia were ringing around, trying to find out anything useful, then calling or texting me to let me know if they were making progress. I’d been racking my brains for hours for some clue as to what this might all be about. The only possibility I’d been able to come up with was that it was some kind of payback for Marcus having been critical of Nakheel’s land valuation process.
I remember at one point Chris O’Donnell called and I was so angry with him, saying, ‘You need to get Marcus out, he’s done nothing wrong!’
He was very calm and said, ‘Yes, we’re trying to find out where he is.’
Before I knew it, it was time to leave for the restaurant where we were having the celebration. I was seated next to Carol and Allan. Allan had been suffering from cancer for a number of years by this point, but this day I really saw its toll on him. He looked grey and sickly.
‘How’s Marcus?’ they asked.
I managed to keep my voice steady as I said, ‘He’s fine. That’s him I was talking to on the phone. He’s very busy with work.’
I had the phones on silent but I kept having to get up and check on them. I made it look as though I was just circulating, doing my daughterly duty to make sure everyone was having a good time. I kept a smile plastered on my face and tried to hide my shaking hands. Anyone who did notice the state I was in probably thought it was because I had to make a speech for Mum.
My mother, Bet, is one tough cookie. She was just two years old and her sister was four when their mother died. Her dad tried to look after the girls on his own but it was the Depression and he had to travel to try to find work. After a few years, he decided the girls would be better off living with his sister so he took them from Sydney over the Blue Mountains to her place in Lithgow. But they didn’t like living there, so they ran away and somehow these tiny little things got themselves all the way back home to Sydney.
When my siblings and I were growing up and something bad happened — from a little thing like a scraped knee to something that felt earth-shattering at the time — Mum would say, ‘Stop whinging’ and ‘Whatever it is, deal with it’. Because we knew she’d lived by that philosophy her whole life, her words had power, and her approach to life became mine as well.
I don’t remember everything I said while making Mum’s birthday speech, but I do remember talking about how she always expected us to find a way to deal with whatever happened, no matter how bad it was. I remember looking out at all those familiar faces. Only Leanne knew what was really in my mind as I spoke those words. We slipped outside and she gave me another big hug until I could steady myself to go back in and act as though I hadn’t a care in the world.
MARCUS
When we left the villa the men gestured for me to get back into the car, and once more they got in on either side of me.
‘Where are we going now?’ I asked, but there was no reply. We drove and drove and drove. We seemed to be heading east into the desert. At first I had been able to see streetlights dimly through the heavily tinted windows, but they had long since disappeared. I started becoming fearful again.
Eventually th
e car slowed and pulled up briefly. I could hear the driver speaking in Arabic, and what might have been the sound of automatic gates opening. We went a little further and the same thing happened again. We drove on further. For the first time in my life I had literally no idea where I was. I didn’t even know if we were still in Dubai. The car door was opened and we got out. The night was black but, from the brief glimpse I got before being led inside, we seemed to be in the driveway of some kind of compound.
I was led into a small reception area and told to sit. There were barred doors on the two entrances that led from the room into the heart of the building. A man in a kandura came through one of these. The men who had brought me here, police I had assumed, handed him my Blackberry, wallet, keys and notebook and left without another word. He sat down next to me and told me to empty my pockets.
I asked him where I was, saying, ‘Is this a jail? Am I going to be kept here?’
‘Don’t worry,’ he replied, clearly meaning to be reassuring. ‘It’s not like a normal jail — there’s no murderers here.’
My whole body was shaking by now. I thought, ‘This can’t be happening to me.’
After filling out a form, the man — like all the others, he hadn’t identified himself and wore no ID — led me through one of the locked doors into a twisting, turning corridor and past what appeared to be a row of solid steel cell doors. Opening a door with the number 3 on it, he gestured me in, saying, ‘Relax and try to get some sleep. You will be woken in a few hours. Don’t worry, it will be all sorted out tomorrow.’ His manner was slightly more sympathetic than any of the other officials had been so far, but I could sense this was something he said routinely to newcomers, probably to stop them panicking. He went out, locking the heavy door behind him.
The room was tiny — about 2.5 metres by 1.5 metres. The walls and floor were concrete and it was chilly. I’d gone into the police station just twelve hours earlier (though it felt like days) wearing my usual business uniform of suit pants and jacket, a white cotton shirt and sturdy RM Williams boots. My jacket had been taken away and now I was shivering with cold (it was winter in the desert) as well as shock. There was no window and the only light was a dim glow coming from under the large steel door. The majority of the floor space was taken up by a makeshift bed: a thin mattress lying on top of concrete building blocks with an old grayish blanket on it. There was no toilet. The only thing in the room apart from the bed was a small, old, portable TV, bolted into a corner bracket high on the wall. The door had a peephole at eye level and a thin opening, like a letter-box, down near the bottom. Next to the door was a small metal intercom box that had a button and the glow of a small red light.
After a short while the guard who had locked me in came back, tossed a TV remote on the bed and handed me two small water containers. He slammed the door behind him and I heard other doors distantly banging and clanking, with the sound of keys rattling every now and then over the next few hours, but nothing else. I was in no mood for TV but I turned it on anyway. I sat on the edge of the bed in the flickering light, my mind reeling.
At some point I must have fallen asleep because I awoke to the clanking of a set of keys as my door was opened. With no watch and no window I had no way of knowing how much time had passed. A new guard (the morning shift, I guessed) took me along the corridor to a piece of white wall. He wrote something in Arabic on a small whiteboard and directed me to stand against the wall holding the board, then he took a mug-shot. Next he led me to a small room where there was a large upright orange machine that was supposed to take fingerprints. It didn’t seem to be working properly and it took him more than an hour to get the prints he wanted. I tried to ask him where I was and how long I would be there, but, as with all the other officials I’d asked, he gave no reply.
When he locked me back in my cell there was a small white cardboard box on the floor containing flatbread and something brown that I couldn’t identify in a foil container. Other than a little bread at the police station, I’d had nothing to eat since lunchtime yesterday but I wasn’t hungry. I was very thirsty, but there was no water in the box. I was also very cold and needed the toilet. I pressed the button on the intercom.
‘Na’am?’ rang out the answer: ‘Yes?’
I explained I needed to go to the bathroom.
‘Wait,’ the voice yelled. About twenty minutes later, when no-one had come, I buzzed and asked again. A very angry man in a kandura opened the door and said I was only to ring the bell in an emergency. I told him that I just wanted to go to the bathroom. Crossly he led me past ten or so other cells to a very dirty bathroom with two toilets, a shower and a wash basin, and a camera positioned over the doorway. When I was done he returned me to my cell and locked me in.
Sitting on the bed, ears straining for any signs of life, I made out the sound of someone talking. It sounded like Matt Joyce. Thinking my imagination might be getting the better of me, I knelt down and pressed my ear against the ventilation slit in the door, but whatever I’d heard had stopped now.
For many hours I just sat. There wasn’t enough room to pace. Standing in the middle of the cell with my arms stretched out I could reach from one side wall to the other. In theory watching TV would have helped, as the minutes dragged by like hours, but I was too agitated to give it any attention. Instead I wrestled with what had happened, going over the questions I’d been asked, trying to find clues.
Eventually another guard came with another cardboard food box. I asked him if I could make a phone call, saying my wife would be worried.
‘Not allowed,’ he said, slamming the door behind him. The box had identical contents to the earlier one and I put it, too, untouched on the floor. The rest of the day inched by at the same agonising pace. No-one spoke to me. I had dropped off the face of the earth. I could only hope that people were looking for me. People can’t just disappear, I tried to tell myself. But maybe in Dubai you could.
JULIE
The calls and texts kept coming in on my two phones, including ones from people I’d never heard of. Nobody knew anything yet, but they were all desperately trying to find out. I spoke to Matt Joyce’s wife, Ange. She said she had a number for Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the chairman of Dubai World, and she would call him to try to get information. She seemed just as mystified as I was, but a lot calmer. It must have been better being in Dubai and not thousands of miles away.
At some point I got a call from a guy who told me his name was Jim something. He said he worked for a Dubai-based legal firm. I wasn’t sure why he was involved or who gave him my number but I was grateful for his help. He said he had heard Marcus and Matt were being held by State Security. I asked him what State Security was but he wasn’t sure. I asked where they were being held but he said no-one had been able to find out yet.
He tried to explain the legal process in Dubai. I was making notes as he told me that police had 48 hours after an arrest to take their case to a prosecutor and then the prosecutor had a certain amount of time to decide how they wanted to handle it. I found it almost impossible to take in what he was saying. All I could think of was that, despite all this effort, no-one could find out where my husband was or if he was still alive.
The morning after Mum’s party I couldn’t keep it a secret any longer. My brother, sister, brother-in-law and my niece Leanne were all at Mum’s place. I sat them down, took a deep breath and told them what was going on. They were horrified but they all knew Marcus so well, they knew there was no possibility he had done something wrong. Mum was very worried about Marcus but she didn’t fuss. In typical fashion she said, ‘Okay, so what can we do?’
I explained about all the calls and how hard it was to get information.
She said, ‘Well, when do you need to go back?’
I’d been due to fly out five days later but I had to say, ‘I don’t know if I can go back.’ I still didn’t know why Marcus had been detained so I had no idea whether the authorities would let me into the country, or if they di
d whether they would then arrest me too.
We discussed if I should tell Marcus’s parents. I thought about how frail Allan had looked, and I knew Carol was very concerned about her own 90-year-old mother who was in hospital, bedridden. They had enough to worry about so I decided to hold off. My hope was that we could get everything sorted out and if we told them about it at all, it would be as a kind of ‘you’ll never believe what happened’ after the fact. I’m not sure how I would have coped if I’d known that, even though Allan would live for another two years, he would never be able to see Marcus again.
MARCUS
I knew it was daytime because I could hear the first of the five prayer calls coming from a speaker outside my cell door. The first call came at dawn and since it was winter, that meant it must be around 6 a.m. I had read how disorientation was used to break people psychologically, but until I experienced it I would never have believed how devastating it is to feel so cut off, to have no way to measure time and no control over anything, including things as basic as having a drink of water, using the bathroom or turning on a light.
During the long night I had used the intercom several times. Often it was left unanswered, but when someone did respond I’d ask if I could also call my wife. The answer was always the same: ‘No, not allowed’. I knew Julie would be frantic and I also desperately wanted to hear her voice. When the breakfast box came, I asked again. The guard, who I hadn’t seen before, was gruff, but at least he said he would go and check.
Not long after he left two more men in kanduras came and led me to a small closed-in area surrounded by cells. It formed a kind of central well in the centre of the building, with a glass ceiling that stretched up into the storey above.
I sat, as I was told to. Two more men in kanduras, guards I assumed, were in the room, along with a man, possibly Indian, wearing a doctor’s white coat and another man, possibly Filipino, wearing what might have been some sort of male nurse’s uniform. The nurse, if that’s who he was, sat next to me fossicking in what looked to be a plastic toolbox by his side. Directly in front of me was a small bookcase containing what I guessed were copies of the Quran and a few other books in English and Arabic. At the other end of the room was a simple weight set and an old exercise bike.