Where Have All the Young Girls Gone

by Leena Lehtolainen

  “Omar Hassan’s story blows Rahim’s alibi out of the water. Let’s see what he has to say. If you want to get Tuomas Soivio to admit to doing something he didn’t do, Koivu, then you can do the interrogation yourself. And take Puustjärvi with you while you’re at it. The rest of us are going to stay here and question Rahim Ezfahani.” Ruuskanen fingered his gold chain as he talked, freeing some chest hair that had gotten caught in the necklace.

  Koivu looked at me, shaking his head. There wasn’t any point in grousing about little things. Koivu was technically my subordinate, and ordering him around was my job, even though our cell was assisting Ruuskanen’s unit in this homicide investigation. The sooner it was over, the faster we would be able to get back to looking for Sara, Ayan, and Aziza.

  A knock came at the door, and we looked up to see Akkila from the crime reporting desk.

  “Um, since there isn’t anyone on the switchboard right now . . . I had to leave my station because there’s a man downstairs demanding to see”—Akkila had to cheat and look at the name on a piece of paper—“the lead investigator for the Noor Ezfahani murder case. He claims his son is being held here at the station without cause.”

  “Mr. Soivio, presumably,” Koivu whispered to me.

  “Tell him we don’t have time to meet anyone right now! Tuomas Soivio has been arrested legally and will be released when we’re done questioning him and charges have been filed.” Ruuskanen wiped the sweat off his upper lip; apparently his mustache felt hot. “Take down his phone number. I’ll call him when I have time. I repeat: when I have time.”

  Akkila shrugged and disappeared. We went through a few more details from the forensic investigation and the autopsy report, and then Koivu and Puustjärvi left. The rest of us, seven all together, stayed to wait for Rahim Ezfahani and Gullala, the interpreter, whom Timonen, as the youngest in the group, was ordered to fetch.

  Gullala arrived first, seeming keyed up. She didn’t look anyone but me in the eyes. Then Rahim was brought into the room. When he saw how many police officers there were, he tried to make a break for it, but Puupponen grabbed him by the sleeve, and Timonen blocked access to the door. Thankfully, no one had put handcuffs on Rahim’s maimed wrists. The bandages I’d put on the night before were still in place; they made Rahim look like a suicidal man who hadn’t been able to decide which wrist he was going to slash.

  Puupponen started the audio recorder and the video camera. Rahim stared at his hands as Ruuskanen, with Gullala interpreting, asked him to state his name, age, and address for the record. Rahim did so without any trouble, but when Ruuskanen started to ask questions about the events of Tuesday night, the young Iranian wouldn’t say a word. Apparently, he’d had enough time in the cell to think about what the wisest course of action would be and had decided it was silence.

  “Once more: Did you meet your cousin Noor Ezfahani after she left her apartment building and went to the bus stop?” Ruuskanen was starting to lose his cool, and Gullala’s voice had risen a couple of octaves since the beginning of the interrogation, as she translated the same words for the tenth time. Ursula tapped the table with her fingernails. The shiny silver polish on her thumbnail had chipped a little, and her perfume smelled a day old. I could tell she was really irritated.

  “There’s no point trying to deny it,” she said suddenly, standing up and walking straight over to the boy, who was sitting a few steps away from the rest of us. He didn’t raise his eyes. “We know you did it. Translate!” she almost yelled at Gullala.

  “Hey, Honkanen . . . ,” Ruuskanen began.

  “You be quiet! I’m not afraid of anyone accusing me of racism. You don’t have to translate that. Instead, tell young Mr. Ezfahani that Finnish prison won’t be fun for an immigrant child murderer. They might even feed you pork if you aren’t careful. So, it would be best to confess now so you get off with a shorter sentence.”

  “Don’t translate that, Gullala. Come on, Ursula, we’re not at Guantanamo Bay, we’re in Espoo,” Koivu said, interrupting.

  There was another knock at the door. This time it was Liisa Rasilainen.

  “Someone is asking for you, Maria.”

  “We’re in the middle of something!” Ruuskanen snapped.

  I stood up and slipped out the door.

  “Who’s asking for me?”

  “She says she’s the mother of the murdered girl. She just stopped me in the parking lot on my way in. She said she didn’t dare talk to the man who was sitting in the lobby, but that she could talk to me.”

  “Where is Mrs. Ezfahani?”

  “She’s waiting in the lobby. I had to leave her with Akkila.”

  Ruuskanen and company could get by just fine without me, as long as Ursula and Ruuskanen didn’t come to blows. I followed Liisa down the stairs into the nearly empty lobby. Mrs. Ezfahani was standing next to the octopus mascot, stroking its yellow tentacles. Her face was completely expressionless. It was like a deep well that had permanently dried up.

  “Detective Kallio. Rahim here?”

  “He is currently in police custody.”

  “You know? He tell?”

  “What should Rahim tell?”

  Mrs. Ezfahani said something in Persian; her voice was quiet and tired. Then she flinched and continued in Finnish.

  “Family is everything, and tribe, I always think. And man better . . . bigger. But man cannot kill my girl.” Then she muttered something again in Persian. It sounded like she was pleading for strength.

  “Rahim did it. Kill Noor. Maybe Reza kill me now, but they order it. All the men. They order, and Rahim kill my Noor.”

  14

  As I made the trek to work on Monday morning, I felt like there was sand in my eyes. I’d slept just fine the night before, but a weekend full of work had taken its toll, and I didn’t know when I would be able to take my comp time. My situation would be getting better, though, because it looked like Noor Ezfahani’s murder had been solved. Rahim had not confessed—he’d stuck with the silent approach—but the evidence against him was piling up. The most damning, of course, was Noor’s mother’s statement. I’d gotten her a place in the Espoo women’s shelter, because apparently her life wasn’t worth much now that she had betrayed Rahim. I thought about how the judicial system would treat her. According to Finnish law, no one had to testify in a case that would incriminate next of kin. In Iranian culture all of the Ezfahanis were the same family, i.e., next of kin. In Finland, only the nuclear family counted. Rahim was Mrs. Noor Ezfahani’s husband’s nephew, so he was not a blood relative. At its most draconian, the court could charge Mrs. Ezfahani and the rest of the members of Noor’s birth family with obstruction of justice. Oddly enough, Rahim’s brother, father, and grandfather might be able to avoid that charge, but the prosecutors would certainly consider slapping them with aiding and abetting or even accessory to murder. Noor’s mother’s story felt true, but a skilled lawyer would be able to make it look like a sieve and lump her in with the rest of the family.

  On Tuesday night Noor had left for the Girls Club and to meet Tuomas Soivio. The family had tried to stop her from going, because Noor’s rebellion had gone too far—she wasn’t wearing her headscarf at school anymore and was dating an infidel. Dinner had ended in a fight, because Grandfather Reza had forbidden Noor from leaving.

  “Noor not afraid. She say Finland law on she side. No can forbid, no hit. Tuomas know, and friends at Girls Club. We have to let she go or she tell police.”

  But Noor had left crying, because the men of the family had called her names that her mother wasn’t willing to repeat. The jealous Rahim had followed Noor. He had come to dinner in the car he had borrowed from Omar Hassan and offered Noor a ride. Though Rahim hadn’t given us any details, we speculated that the young people had quarreled in the car, and at the end of the fight Rahim had strangled Noor.

  When Mrs. Ezfahani came to that point, she lost her ability to speak Finnish entirely. I took her to our case room, offered her tea, and went back to
the Violent Crime conference room, where they were still in a deadlock. I pulled Ruuskanen aside and repeated what Mrs. Ezfahani had told me so far.

  “This could be our breakthrough. Maybe it would be a good idea to put Rahim’s interrogation on hold and take Gullala over to translate for Mrs. Ezfahani.”

  “Why did she come tell you this all of a sudden?” Ruuskanen said, dumbfounded.

  “You just said yourself that some Muslim men don’t speak at all to women. The same goes the other way too. Gullala is also a woman. What if the two of us tried to get a statement out of Mrs. Ezfahani right now, which would have some actual evidentiary value? Then we’ll have something concrete on the men of the family, including our main suspect.”

  Ruuskanen understood that the most important thing was solving the crime, not how it was solved or who actually did the solving. He shut down Rahim’s questioning for the time being, sent him back to his cell, and instructed the others to pick up the rest of the family members for a new interview.

  “Come with me. There’s another job I need your help with,” I said to Gullala. She followed me down the hall toward my case room. She didn’t ask why the interrogation had been interrupted, and I didn’t want to tell her where we were going. She was an interpreter after all, not a fellow officer. When she saw Mrs. Ezfahani, she nodded in deference to the older woman and straightened her headscarf.

  “I’m going to be taping this conversation. Could Mrs. Ezfahani repeat in Persian what she just told me in Finnish?”

  Gullala’s eyes grew wide as Noor’s mother’s narrative progressed. Now she spoke in a perfectly calm, even voice, and I wondered if she was in shock. There were more details in the Persian version of the story. Rahim had strangled Noor as she sat in the front seat, covered her face with the scarf, and then driven to the parking lot of the Puolarmetsä community garden, where he put the body in the back seat and covered it with the floor mat from the trunk. Then he drove home and called the men of the family together for a meeting.

  “Wait,” I said, interrupting. “The neighbor who said she saw Noor leaving home crying Tuesday night at six claimed she didn’t have a headscarf.”

  “She left with the scarf on her head but took it off immediately in the hallway. Or so I suppose. Of course, Rahim demanded that she put it back on. It was inappropriate to sit in the car with him with her head uncovered. And that was what started the fight. Noor didn’t want to wear the headscarf anymore, didn’t want Islam anymore. Is that what they were teaching her at the Girls Club?”

  It felt like Gullala was joining in Noor’s mother’s question. I would answer her later if she still wanted to know.

  “Nothing was said to me. The men just left, to smoke the water pipe and drink tea, to talk about men’s business. No one came home for a long time. There was no sign of Noor. Then the men came back and ordered me to go to sleep—they were going to be up late. I said that I could not go to bed before Noor came home. Reza, my husband, said that Noor was with them. I knew at that point that all was not well. I thought that maybe they would beat her, or get an imam to marry her to Rahim, even though a marriage like that would not be legal in Finland. Noor had said that we could not force her because she had to be eighteen before she could get married according to the law. And then we wouldn’t be able to tell her what to do anymore. She’d laughed when she said that, laughed in her father’s face.”

  Mrs. Ezfahani hadn’t been able to sleep, however, and instead she’d waited up and prayed that things would take a turn for the better. Allah was wise and all powerful. She had waited in her darkened room for the men to return, and when she saw them in the yard she quickly got in her bed and pretended to be asleep. But she could hear her husband and sons speaking quietly and, from the snatches of conversation, realized they hadn’t beaten Noor or forcibly married her to Rahim but rather that she had been killed.

  “I’d known that things would go badly when I heard about that boy. Rahim and Vafa saw Noor with him, and when they asked her who he was, Noor answered that it was none of her brother’s business, and even less of her cousin’s business, even though she had been promised to Rahim years ago. Noor would always do what she wanted, because in this country the law protected her. She would become a doctor who would treat both men and women. Noor was defiant and paid for it.”

  Gullala was barely able to keep her voice steady as she interpreted Mrs. Ezfahani’s words for me, and now and then her eyes appeared to grow moist. I didn’t know whether she was married, and if she was, if she had entered the matrimonial state of her own free will or if someone else had chosen her spouse. Mrs. Ezfahani continued her story as if the words were a river that had broken through a dam and were now impossible to stop.

  “In the morning we got up to pray. No one said anything to me about Noor. When we prayed, I asked where she was. Reza ordered me to make tea. I said that I wasn’t going to make any tea until someone told me where my daughter was. He ordered me to be silent. I made the tea. I was silent. Then the others came, without Noor, and they told me that I had to do exactly as they instructed, to say the words they told me to say, and then all would be well. But I heard during the night that it was Rahim. And Reza told me later in secret, away from the boys. He didn’t want to have it weighing on his conscience. He wanted to be able to bury Noor according to Islamic tradition. He was sad. He hadn’t wanted Noor to die, but he could not expose his brother’s son, who had just been trying to defend his family’s honor. And Reza said something even worse, but I couldn’t believe it. Noor had told Rahim mockingly that he wouldn’t want her anymore anyway, because she had given her virginity to that infidel boy. She must have just been teasing. That can’t be true, can it? It is against everything I taught her. Did she really die having done something so terrible?”

  I could imagine what had happened in the car. In anger Noor had belittled her jealous, sexually frustrated cousin. But Noor wasn’t to blame for her fate. The guilty party was the one who had wrapped the headscarf around her neck and strangled her to death. I could see how Rahim had been able to convince himself that he had done the right thing. Over the course of my career I’d met enough Finnish wife beaters that I wasn’t about to blame Rahim’s act on his religious convictions alone. It was the unadulterated desire to possess that had been raging inside of him, though he used the old ways to justify it, the order of the world dictated by Allah.

  “By Allah I had to tell, even though we may be sent back to Iran, and nothing good will come of it.”

  “I hardly think your residency permits will be revoked so easily. Rahim is the only one with a criminal history. I wouldn’t vouch for his residency status, though.”

  “But what if my husband says that he will divorce me? Where will I move then? What will I live on? I probably won’t be welcome at the mosques anymore. I’ve betrayed my family. Maybe they will kill me next.” Now there was a teary sing-song quality to Noor’s voice, the same sort of wailing as the professional mourners I’d seen documentaries about. Was that how things were even today—the men declared war and stirred up the masses, and the women wept over the consequences? Was that still how the world was now, at the beginning of the third millennium? I wanted to believe that humanity would be better off if there were more women in leadership roles, but it often felt like those who sought power didn’t hesitate to use it for evil as well as good, regardless of gender.

  After their arrest on Saturday, Ruuskanen changed interrogation tactics with the other Ezfahanis. Now they were isolated from one another and presented with a new line of questioning. Ruuskanen made it clear that next of kin meant, according to Finnish law, a direct descendant or ascendant, plus siblings. A cousin or an uncle wasn’t close enough to count, so Noor’s immediate family didn’t have the legal right to refuse to testify against Rahim. After hearing this, Noor’s younger brother, Vafa, started to cry, and then began contradicting the agreed-upon story. Koivu questioned him, and after a couple of hours, Vafa admitted that he had seen his
sister dead in “some car.” He was unwilling to name the perpetrator.

  The Ezfahanis’ interrogations would continue for days. All of the men were under arrest for the time being. Because they’d been arrested over the weekend, the cell block was busy anyway. Tuomas Soivio’s father had returned to the station on Saturday afternoon and continued to demand for his son’s release. Apparently, in his excitement Ruuskanen had forgotten all about Tuomas. Mr. Soivio brought a lawyer with him on his second visit, so Ruuskanen had thought it best to release the boy, but instructed him to stay reachable for upcoming questioning. I happened to be leaving just as Tuomas, his father, and their lawyer, who was none other than my school friend and short-term boyfriend Kristian Ljungberg, were making their way through the lobby, also on their way out. Kristian had been in a relationship with Ursula Honkanen a couple of years ago too, and I hoped desperately that the two of them wouldn’t run into each other. I didn’t feel like playing umpire.

  “Maria, it’s nice to see you’re alive.” Kristian took me by the shoulders and kissed me on both cheeks in the orthodox manner, his lips touching air, not skin. “Wasn’t there some skirmish in Afghanistan in the fall? How did you end up in a place like that anyway?”

  “Business, Kristian, business.”

  “It would appear that we have common business now. My client has been doing his best to help solve his girlfriend’s murder, and as thanks the police threw him in jail for a night. A very unfortunate situation.”

  “You know the law as well as I do, and you know that assault and battery, assault with a deadly weapon, and unlawful detention aren’t small potatoes. Charges will be brought.”

  “Has he confessed yet?” Tuomas interrupted.

  “You mean Rahim Ezfahani? No.”

  “But it was him. Noor detested him.”

  “Let us do our work. We’ve been making progress.” If I had been alone with Tuomas, I might have hinted that there was evidence of Rahim’s guilt, but I didn’t want to do it in front of Kristian. It wasn’t really Tuomas’s business anyway, even though Noor had been his girlfriend. My mind filled with a mixture of pity and rage when I thought about Tuomas. Did he have to go acting like some video game hero? And I had been dragged into his soap opera.