Where Have All the Young Girls Gone

by Leena Lehtolainen

  I waited for the operator to figure out the location of the nearest patrol car, keeping a close eye on Tuomas and Heini. They had stopped, and now Tuomas was whispering something to Heini. I tried to work my way between them and the door.

  “Six-three-seven was getting coffee at the Teboil station a couple of blocks away. They’ll be there momentarily.”

  “Good. Out.”

  Because the phone had prevented me from hearing with one ear, and the noise of the girls had interfered with the other, I hadn’t been able to hear Heini and Tuomas’s conversation. I stepped closer to them and touched Tuomas on the shoulder.

  “Tuomas Soivio? Detective Maria Kallio, Espoo police. We’ve been trying to reach you. We need to talk.”

  Tuomas broke away from Heini. The shoulder of her shirt was wet with his tears.

  “A patrol car will be here soon. We’re going to take you to the police station to be interviewed.”

  “Are you seriously going to arrest Tuomas, you moron? He hasn’t done anything!” For a second, I thought Heini was going to attack me.

  “He’s not being arrested, but I would recommend that he cooperate with the police.” I heard the van pull up outside, and the Black Maria’s front doors rattled familiarly as they were pushed open. The doorbell rang, and when I opened the door, a familiar officer marched into the room. Five years before I’d been with Officer Himanen for one of the most harrying arrests of my life. The other policeman’s shirt said “Sutinen,” and he looked like he was fresh out of the academy.

  “This is Tuomas Soivio, the one Violent Crime has been looking for. They want to question him about Noor Ezfahani’s murder.” I tried to keep my voice down, though I knew the girls could still hear every word I said. “Take him to the station and put him in a waiting room. I’ll see if someone from the investigation team is still there and can interview him, or I’ll come down myself. Don’t worry, Tuomas. We’re just asking for your help.”

  The boy looked at me like he didn’t understand a word I said. Then he shrugged. Neither Himanen nor Sutinen had to use any force; Tuomas followed them out like a trained dog.

  My next task was even more difficult than handing Tuomas Soivio over to the police patrol. I looked around for a familiar face. Iida didn’t need me to say anything. She knew that it was time to leave. And I knew that it would be a long time before she forgave me for what had happened.

  8

  “Where are you going now?” my father asked as I dropped Iida off at the door. He was just stepping out to empty the trash. I was letting him play housemaid. Maybe, as a retiree, he felt that it was his responsibility, given how long my workday was dragging on.

  Since Iida had already seen how Noor’s murder investigation was going, I’d called Ruuskanen as we were driving away from the Girls Club and asked where the officers in his unit were. Koivu and Puupponen had both checked in around seven p.m., saying they were leaving the station after having finished interviewing the Ezfahani cousins, the uncle, and the grandfather. Their reports would already be online. Ursula had gotten in touch with Susanne Jansson’s parents and, after questioning them, had also contacted the doctor who had given the order to keep people from disturbing Susanne for the time being.

  “The family is protecting their little princess now that she’s seen what life is really like. It sounds like they’ve poured about half a drugstore into her. She wouldn’t be any use, even if we could talk to her,” Ursula said over the phone. “I did get out of them that Tuomas and Noor had been at their house with Susanne sometimes, and that they were clearly a couple. Or however it was the old lady said it, så gulliga, so cute. They’re bättre folk, the Janssons, Swede Finns. The husband is some sort of bigwig at Aktia Bank and looks good enough to eat.”

  Luckily Iida was listening to music, not Ursula. Because the rest of Ruuskanen’s unit was busy, I called Puupponen and asked him to meet me at the station. He was at the gym and promised to be there in half an hour. Koivu’s children could have a night with their dad. Puupponen could have managed Soivio just as well without me, but I wanted to be there. I was the one who found him—even if it was just by luck and at poor Iida’s expense.

  The only person in the lobby at the station was the duty officer, but he knew what was going on and told me that Soivio had been taken to an interrogation room downstairs. Koskinen, the guard on duty in Holding, was keeping an eye on him. The boy had been calm when he was brought in, and a text message to Koskinen confirmed that he still was. There was no rush.

  Outside it was already dark. Silence enveloped the station. The ticking of the clock was the only sound. The department’s mascot, a giant yellow stuffed octopus wearing a police cap, looked tired. I felt like tying its arms together. Liisa Rasilainen appeared, coming from the coffee machine with a fresh cup in hand.

  “Maria, you’re still here?”

  “We found Tuomas Soivio. What are you up to?”

  “I came in to write up a report on what the Ezfahanis’ neighbors told us. I only have a desktop computer. Anyway, it’s better for my back than a laptop. Old dogs and all that.”

  “What did you learn from the neighbors?”

  Liisa took out her notepad. “They confirmed what we already knew: the Ezfahani family was very tight-knit. The grandfather, his second son, and his two grandsons lived a couple of buildings away from Noor’s family, but all nine of them ate together every day and night, meaning Mrs. Noor Ezfahani is the extended family’s full-time cook. Some of the neighbors were irritated by the family constantly running up and down the stairs. The Ezfahani men are supposedly an upstanding lot, not coming home drunk like the Kurds in the next stairwell over, who ‘drink like Christians,’ as a Somali neighbor put it. Loud voices come from the apartment now and then, and sometimes the mother looks like she’s been crying. Noor leaves home with a headscarf on but takes it off on the bus if none of the family is around. Sorry, I have to go get more sugar. The coffee is even worse than usual today!” Liisa made a face and went back to the coffee machine.

  In my office I logged in to the department’s intranet, typed in “PERSIA,” and looked up the reports on the Ezfahani family interviews. The seven Ezfahani men’s version of Tuesday evening’s events was identical to the one Noor’s mother had given me. They’d all said that the nine family members had gathered at five to eat chicken, eggplant, and rice. Grandfather Reza Ezfahani and his second son, Farid, and grandsons, Jalil and Rahim, usually ate with Noor’s family because they lived nearby and because they thought it was good for a family to have their meals together. They also covered part of the cost of the food. The grandfather was already retired, one of Noor’s brothers was in trade school studying to be an electrician, and the other was currently unemployed. The cousins didn’t have work either, but the men in the middle generation were driving freight trucks, mostly transporting groceries and produce from the harbors to distribution centers.

  All of the Ezfahani men had the same impression of Tuomas Soivio—although no one could remember the boy’s name, because “Finnish names are so hard.” Mrs. Noor Ezfahani had used the exact same words. Every member of the family had been interviewed separately, but there seemed to be no cracks in their story. Either they believed they were telling the whole truth, and Noor had been spinning her family a yarn about Tuomas, or they had figured out in advance what they would say. The family had come from an environment in which even the slightest slip of the tongue could mean death. That taught you to choose your words wisely. I intended to recommend to Ruuskanen that we reinterview the whole family together, with almost the same number of police officers there, five at the least. If the family had agreed on a common lie, they would probably start needlessly embellishing it, and one of them would eventually talk them all into a corner.

  Could Tuomas Soivio have gotten so angry about Noor denying their relationship to her family that he killed her? Or had Noor been forced to end the relationship because she had to choose between her family and this Finnish
boy?

  “Howdy.” Puupponen bounced into my office. “It’s good you called. You saved me from ending up in the gutter. I had promised to go with Liskomäki for a beer after my workout, and knowing him, it would have gotten out of hand. Although I did my last set of leg presses a little faster than normal to make it here sooner, and now my legs feel like spaghetti.” Puupponen put his recovery drink bottle to his lips and drank in big gulps that made his Adam’s apple bounce up and down like a fishing bobber in the water.

  “We have contradictory reports on Tuomas Soivio’s relationship with Noor Ezfahani. Numerous witnesses, including my daughter, Iida, believe that Noor and Tuomas were dating. Supposedly everyone knew. Everyone except those in the Ezfahani family.”

  “I interviewed both the grandfather and Noor’s oldest brother, Hamid. We needed a Persian interpreter with the grandfather, since he knows only a few words of Finnish. With Hamid we spoke pidgin. He mixed in English because his Finnish is so bad. But it still felt like the two men were saying the same things, almost word for word. The only difference was that, according to Hamid, they also had roasted nuts with the eggplant, which his grandfather didn’t mention. Is learning Persian very difficult? It’s starting to look like it would be useful to know a bit. For this interview with the boy, are we going to play some roles, or are we just going to be us?”

  “Scare Soivio with a bad joke at the beginning.”

  “Scare? Telling jokes is more of a trust-building tactic. But I’m guessing Tuomas won’t be in a joking mood. Does he understand that even the word of eight people won’t have much weight if we don’t have any concrete evidence?”

  “Let’s go see what he understands.”

  There were two windowless, bleak interrogation rooms in the basement holding cell area. I had asked them to take Tuomas to one of these rooms, because the Holding guard would be able to keep an eye on him. As usual, the patrolmen had taken his cell phone, belt, and anything else that could be used as a weapon, though Soivio didn’t seem like he was a danger to himself any more than he was to someone else. He wasn’t locked up. According to Koskinen, he’d asked for something to drink and been given orange juice. He’d also gone to the restroom under Koskinen’s watch and only spent a moment in there.

  “He seems to have his wits about him. Patrol gave him a breathalyzer, and it came up negative. He doesn’t seem to be on anything. However, he is as dirty as a dog that’s been rolling in the mud.”

  Puupponen and I entered the interrogation room. The overhead light was switched off, and only the glimmer of the table lamp revealed the room to us. Tuomas Soivio had tried to make himself comfortable: he was sitting in the only armchair in the room and had reclined it as far as possible. His feet were up on the table and his eyes were shut. He’d taken off his muddy shoes and wrapped his coat around himself like a blanket. He looked like he was asleep. A few drops of drool had dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

  “Tuomas? Tuomas Soivio?”

  The boy awoke with a start, and when he opened his eyes, it was obvious he didn’t know where he was for a moment. I turned on the overhead light, and the brightness made Soivio’s eyelids flutter.

  “I’m Detective Kallio. We met earlier in the evening at the Girls Club. This is Detective Puupponen. We wouldn’t have had to bring you in to the police station if you had answered our calls.”

  “So, am I under arrest?”

  “No. Why didn’t you respond to any of our messages?”

  Tuomas lowered his feet to the floor and pressed the chair’s reclining button, making the back bounce upright. Puupponen sat down on the other side of the table. I rolled the third chair over to the end of the table between the two men. Soivio rubbed his face and shook himself.

  “I didn’t get any messages.”

  “Not the voice mails, the messages we left with your parents, the texts, the e-mails?”

  “I haven’t been home since yesterday, and my cell phone died. Sorry. I didn’t know anyone was trying to reach me.” I could almost believe him.

  “How close is your friendship with Heini Korhonen?”

  This question surprised Tuomas. He swallowed a couple of times before he answered.

  “We aren’t close at all. I barely know her. But she was Noor’s friend, and I wanted to be with someone who . . . I thought Heini would understand.”

  “So, you know that Noor Ezfahani is dead?” Puupponen asked to make sure.

  “That’s what it says online. It must be true, since Noor isn’t answering her phone.”

  “How have you been able to try to contact her, when your own phone doesn’t work?” Puupponen latched onto the boy’s words instantly, but Tuomas wasn’t thrown off-balance.

  “There are other cell phones in the world, and I know Noor’s number by heart. Where is she now? Can I see her? It doesn’t say anywhere how she was killed. Did she suffer?”

  Again, Soivio almost sounded believable, and his expression would have convinced anyone. But there had been rumors about the scarf online, so his question didn’t hold water. Or maybe he was the rare teenager who didn’t believe everything people said online.

  “When did you last see Noor?”

  “Tuesday . . . at school, during lunch. I didn’t have any classes after that, so I went home. We agreed to meet at eight at my house. She was supposed to come straight from the Girls Club. She was going to drop by there so she wouldn’t be lying to her family. Noor hated not telling the truth. But she never came and didn’t answer any of my texts. I thought maybe those lunatics weren’t letting her out again. I felt like going to find out, but I didn’t. I should have. Maybe I could have saved her . . .”

  “What lunatics?”

  “Those dicks in her family! They’re always lurking somewhere. The cousin, Rahim, is the worst. He thinks Noor should quit school and forget all her dreams of becoming a doctor and instead marry him and start pushing out babies for Finland to support.”

  I remembered what Sylvia Sandelin had said, that Tuomas used to run with an anti-immigrant gang but had changed his mind after falling in love with Noor. Maybe his change of heart only applied to female immigrants.

  “Tell us again what you thought when Noor didn’t show up as you’d arranged,” Puupponen said.

  “That they hadn’t let her leave home again.”

  “Did that happen often?”

  “Now and then. Sometimes Noor got away. They didn’t dare beat her anymore, because Heini and Nelli had said that Noor could notify the police and that the Girls Club would arrange for a lawyer. Noor knew her rights, but she didn’t feel like constantly fighting with those dicks, especially because it hurt her mom so much.”

  Now Tuomas was more alert and animated, and as he moved, dried mud flaked off his clothes onto the chair and floor.

  “Were you home all night Tuesday?”

  “Yes. Which was a mistake. I should have gone to get Noor, to keep her safe, by force if necessary.”

  “Can anyone confirm that you didn’t leave your parents’ home on that evening?”

  Soivio sneered at Puupponen’s question. “Oh, so you want my alibi! Don’t parents count? I was chatting online with a couple of friends, because I was pissed. I’m sure you can still find the discussion threads. Dad’s brother came by at nine thirty and brought me tickets to the Blues’ next hockey game—he stuck his head in my room too. Or won’t you believe him either, since he’s a relative?”

  “Name and contact information?” Puupponen asked, and Tuomas said the name, but that his uncle’s number was in his phone, which was still dead.

  “How would you describe your relationship with Noor Ezfahani?”

  Tuomas must have assumed that the police knew about their relationship, but I wanted to hear him define it in his own words.

  “We were dating. You wouldn’t have dragged me here unless you knew I was Noor’s boyfriend. We’d been going out since last September. There was a dance at school, and that’s where it started.”
<
br />   “What did you do together?”

  Tuomas blushed a little, even though I hadn’t asked whether they’d had a sexual relationship. That would have bearing on the case, because Noor obviously came from a family where it was a given that a bride would be a virgin. Tuomas described a typical high school romance: they hung out in coffee shops, at friends’ houses, or at his house; they watched movies and played video games.

  “Noor went to the Girls Club a lot. Were you jealous that she enjoyed spending time somewhere you weren’t allowed?” Puupponen asked.

  Tuomas shook his head. “I have my own stuff. I play floor hockey and lift weights. The Girls Club is a really good thing for immigrant chicks. They learn that they don’t have to follow the Stone Age rules their imams and stuff try to force on them. And a lot of the time Noor just stopped by there and then came to my place. Her dad and grandpa freaked out when Sylvia Sandelin lectured them about not wanting Noor to go to high school. No one really knows what Sylvia said to them, but after that they didn’t dare stop Noor from going her own way. They tried, of course, when we started dating.”

  “Noor’s family members all claim that you weren’t dating, and that you were harassing Noor, that she didn’t want your attention.”

  The main thing I saw in Tuomas’s expression was astonishment, but after a moment I thought I could see something else, perhaps a mixture of satisfaction and grief.

  “That’s bullshit! Ask anyone in our school: the teachers, our friends, my parents . . . At least a hundred people can tell you we were dating. Maybe they don’t count me as a real boyfriend because I’m an infidel, but who cares? One of them killed Noor because she was with me, but we weren’t doing anything wrong! All I did was love her.”

  Up to this point Tuomas had been oddly calm, but now his voice started to shake, and he tried without success to slurp more liquid out of the empty orange juice box. Puupponen asked if he wanted more to drink and went to get something when Tuomas said yes. I stayed behind. Tuomas was doing everything he could to hold back his tears. When Puupponen returned, this time with a can of Jaffa orange soda, Tuomas opened it in such a way that liquid sprayed across the table and onto his pants, rewetting the dried mud, more of which dribbled onto the floor. Puupponen had to go back out to get some toilet paper, which he and Tuomas used to clean up the mess.