Smilla uncovers Jakkelsen’s hidden drug cache

Smilla uncovers Jakkelsen’s hidden drug cache during a quiet, methodical search of his cabin, where the signs of his drug dependence and the concealment of his supply converge. She finds him barely conscious, discovers injection marks and drug paraphernalia, then follows a few green fibers from his pocketknife to hollow magnetic chess pieces containing plastic tubes. The scene makes the cabin’s neatness and the ordinary objects within it part of the concealment: the cache is not simply found, but inferred from minute physical evidence.

The Search Begins

Smilla waits in her own cabin with the door slightly open. Jakkelsen appears in the corridor and locks himself inside his cabin farther down the passage. Listening at his door, she hears a faint scrape and sees the handle pulled upward: he is wedging a desk chair beneath it. His barricade suggests fear of the women pursuing him, but it also turns a routine room into a space that must be entered deliberately.

Rather than force the door at once, Smilla returns to her cabin and stages an ordinary passage to the bathroom. She takes a pink terrycloth bathrobe and hemp mitt from her box, washes, dries herself, puts lotion on her skin, then walks back along the corridor in bath slippers before creeping to Jakkelsen’s door. The sequence is a practical disguise: the conspicuous bath routine gives her movement a plausible explanation while she waits to learn what is happening inside.

At first, the cabin’s silence offers no answer. Smilla knocks, receives no reply, and uses her own key, but the chair prevents the door from opening. She works the handle up and down until the chair falls, pauses for the resulting panic to subside, then pushes the door open after checking both ends of the corridor. She is aware that the scene could be misunderstood. The entry is cautious, not a confrontation: she avoids drawing attention while crossing the threshold into a room whose occupant may be unable to respond.

Jakkelsen’s Condition

In the dark, Smilla initially thinks the cabin is empty. When she turns on the light, Jakkelsen is lying in bed in delicate pastel Thai silk pajamas. Bubbles of saliva shift at the corners of his mouth with each labored breath; his wrist, extending from his sleeve, is frighteningly thin. He looks waxen and childlike. Smilla shakes him, and his eyelids open only slightly; his eyes roll upward until their whites give her a blind, dead-looking stare. He does not speak.

The details establish that he is not merely sleeping normally. His breathing is faint and difficult, and the response to being shaken is nearly absent. The title’s discovery begins in this uneasy interval, when the room gives Smilla evidence of danger without giving her an explanation. She observes him before she knows what he has taken or where it is kept.

The surrounding surfaces seem orderly: the ashtray beside his bunk is empty, the table holds nothing, and the cabin is neat. Yet the apparent tidiness does not mean there is no evidence. Smilla rolls up his pajama sleeve and sees between forty and sixty small yellowish-blue puncture marks, each with a black center, tracing a fine pattern along swollen veins. The marks make his condition legible on his body even as the room itself appears carefully cleared.

She searches a drawer used for bed linen and finds the things he has dropped inside: foil, matches, an old-fashioned glass hypodermic, fast-drying glue, a syringe, an open pocketknife, a plastic container for sewing-machine needles, and a piece of black rubber packing cord. The drawer is a concealed collection of implements rather than a casual scattering on the table. Smilla concludes that Jakkelsen will not wake for a while and describes his state as a deep, powder-induced sleep, relaxed and free of worry. The cache search therefore takes place while he is incapacitated, not in a face-to-face exchange.

Following the Green Trace

Among the objects in the drawer, the pocketknife provides the next lead. Smilla notices a few bottle-green specks along its blade, then searches Jakkelsen’s clothes again without finding anything of that color. The negative result matters: whatever the residue came from, it is not readily explained by his clothing. The clue is tiny, but it keeps her from treating the drug paraphernalia as the only significant discovery.

Smilla turns to the chess set. Its pieces are meticulously carved from heavy wood, and the board is fitted with a thin metallic plate, a practical arrangement for playing on a moving ship. Magnets at the bases hold the pieces to the board; each piece has a lead-colored disk, with green felt attached underneath. The set’s ordinary shipboard function supplies the mechanism of concealment: the magnetic base can be detached without making the piece’s exterior look unusual.

She slides the knife blade between the metal disk and the base of a white king. The disk resists, but comes loose; a small amount of glue has been applied on either side. A speck of felt remains on the blade, leaving minuscule green fibers that would be easy to overlook without the earlier residue to direct her attention. The pocketknife clue and the chess-piece construction confirm one another: what first looked like a few stray marks becomes a trace linking the knife to a hidden compartment.

The Cache and Its Limits

The white king is hollow, about three inches tall, and contains a cylinder half an inch in diameter. Smilla thinks the pieces may have been manufactured hollow rather than specially made by Jakkelsen, but he has taken advantage of their interior space. Putty seals the top, and three clear plastic tubes sit beneath it. When she shakes them out, four more come after them. The cache is not a single packet but a supply divided among small containers inside an object that belongs naturally on a shipboard chessboard.

Smilla does not dismantle the rest of the set. She puts the tubes back, reseals the hollow piece with putty, and glues the magnet into place. She could have searched the other pieces and tested whether two or three vials would fit in each pawn, perhaps working out whether the supply would last four or six months. Instead, she decides she wants to leave. Her stated hesitation is that a single woman should not remain too long in a strange gentleman’s cabin. The scene ends with the concealment restored rather than exposed to Jakkelsen or to anyone else.

That restraint limits what the discovery can establish. Smilla finds seven tubes in the king, but does not inventory the remaining chess pieces, calculate the total supply, or determine its duration. The evidence proves a hidden drug cache and shows how it is concealed; it does not establish the full quantity or the intended period of use. By putting everything back, she preserves the immediate appearance of an undisturbed cabin while keeping the knowledge she has gained.

Significance of the Discovery

The search shifts from bodily evidence to material inference. Jakkelsen’s punctured, swollen veins and the syringe point to repeated drug use; the drawer reveals tools, while the pocketknife’s green flecks lead Smilla to the chess set. Each clue answers a different question: his condition indicates the immediate crisis, the drawer shows the means, and the hollow king reveals where part of the supply is hidden. The progression gives the scene its investigative structure without turning it into an open accusation.

The chess pieces also sharpen the contrast between public order and private concealment. The set is practical, carefully made, and neatly integrated into cabin life; its magnetic design keeps pieces in place aboard a ship, while its hollow interior allows a second use. Smilla’s discovery depends on recognizing that a seemingly functional object can serve both purposes. The green felt, first an ordinary base, becomes the minute material link that makes the concealed use visible.

The episode leaves Jakkelsen asleep and the cache in place. Smilla has seen the severity of his condition and identified a hidden supply, but she leaves before determining its full extent or confronting him. The discovery is therefore both decisive and incomplete: it converts suspicion into physical knowledge while preserving the uncertainty around what remains in the other pieces and what will happen when Jakkelsen wakes.