Ravn's wallet and the photographs inside

Ravn's wallet and the photographs inside are both evidence and an unintended portrait of the people caught in Ravn's investigation. When Smilla steals the heavy brown leather wallet, its contents expose the reach of surveillance around her while also revealing a private, familial side of Ravn that complicates her view of him. The final photograph, showing Tørk Hviid in a tropical setting, makes the wallet more than a record of observation: it becomes a clue connecting the investigation to Tørk.

The wallet as a physical object

Smilla takes the wallet while helping the elderly Ravn into his coat. She explains her action to the mechanic as petty theft, and lays the wallet on the table beneath the light, in the place where Isaiah's cigar box had once stood. The handling is precise and almost forensic: she empties the contents, examines the photographs, and eventually puts back the papers, tooth, and coins. Her one exception is the photograph of Tørk.

The wallet's ordinary contents make its significance sharper. It holds credit cards and krone notes, a parking card bearing a black embossed crown that gives Ravn access to Ministry parking at Slotsholm, and a tailor's bill for an overcoat costing 8,000 kroner. A clipped fabric sample identifies the coat as gray Lewis tweed, delivered on October 27, 1993. Smilla had taken Ravn's broad-shouldered coats for secondhand mistakes; the bill shows they are deliberately made that way, an expensive attempt to create the illusion of additional breadth. This detail shifts her impression of him toward the conciliatory: the bureaucratic exterior is partly a carefully constructed appearance.

A coin pouch contains a baby tooth. The mechanic recognizes it as such, and the family photographs explain its presence: the tooth belongs to the intimate domestic world recorded in the wallet, not to the investigation's official paperwork. Among the papers and money, this small object quietly joins Ravn's public identity to his private attachments.

Photographs and surveillance

The photographs first show a white-haired woman in rimless glasses and a white wool suit, seated beside a mahogany buffet and a shelf of books. Other color photographs place her among children and grandchildren: pushing a child on a swing, cutting a cake in the yard, and receiving a baby from a younger woman who resembles her in the jaw and Ravn in her gauntness. The images establish a family context for the tooth and give Ravn a life outside the role of investigator.

A black-and-white image shows Isaiah's footprints in snow. Smilla recognizes them and explains why the photograph is overexposed: police photography can make snow disappear in glare when flash or lights are used at an angle greater than 45 degrees. To record tracks in snow, the lights must be placed level with it and used with Polaroid filters. The photograph therefore preserves a trace of Isaiah while also exposing a procedural failure: the police did not know how to photograph the very surface on which his movements had been left.

The next image is a blurry photograph of Smilla on the sidewalk outside Elsa Lübing's building, taken through a car window with part of the door blocking the lens. The photograph confirms that someone has followed or watched her closely enough to record her movements. Its poor framing does not make it less revealing; the obstructed view marks it as an image made covertly, from inside a vehicle.

The mechanic appears in two further images, one profile and one full-face. He explains that they are old photographs from his military service. Set beside the image of Smilla, these pictures show that the surveillance reaches beyond the immediate investigation and incorporates an existing record of the mechanic. The wallet's photographs thus assemble the investigators and the people under observation into a single, disturbing collection.

The final photograph and its consequence

The last photograph is a color vacation image of sunshine and green palm trees. The mechanic asks why Ravn would take pictures of them; Smilla reasons that the photographs are meant to be shown to other people, since Ravn would not need them to prompt his own memory. She returns the wallet's papers, tooth, and coins but keeps this last image. Unlike the surveillance pictures, it appears to show an ordinary holiday scene, yet its apparent ease makes it especially striking: Tørk wears a shirt and tie beneath his laboratory coat and looks cool and comfortable despite the heat and humidity Smilla infers from the setting.

The identification changes the photograph's function. What first looks like a personal snapshot becomes a link between Ravn's collection and Tørk, and Smilla's decision to retain it separates this clue from the rest of the wallet. The sequence moves from bureaucratic credentials and family keepsakes to images of Isaiah, Smilla, and the mechanic, then ends on Tørk. The wallet is therefore not merely a container of private belongings. It is a fragmented record of who has been watched, who belongs to Ravn's personal world, and who may be connected to the hidden business Smilla is pursuing.