Copenhagen Police

Copenhagen Police is the authority Smilla turns to after Isaiah’s death and the institution whose response becomes a measure of how official procedure can both dismiss a case and exert pressure on the person challenging that dismissal. Its presence is distributed across headquarters, Division A, and individual investigators: an administrative chain that promises thoroughness, closes the death as an accident, and later demonstrates its capacity to monitor and detain Smilla.

Structure and First Contact

After returning from the State Autopsy Center for Greenland, Smilla recalls that she had called police headquarters that morning. The call was transferred to Division A, where she was put through to the investigator nicknamed the Toenail. He tells her that she can see Isaiah in the morgue and speak with the doctor, Loyen. The exchange makes the police a practical gateway to both the body and the medical authorities, even as the short instructions leave Smilla to pursue the next steps herself.

When she calls again, after leaving Juliane with her papers and grief, the Toenail is still at his office. Smilla asks about the death certificate and the footprints. He says the certificate was signed that day at four o’clock, then insists that the police do not discriminate and that they investigate every case fully, whether it concerns a person who fell or a serious offender. He says he personally collected the forensic report and that it contains no indication other than an accident; he also puts the number of comparable accidents at 175 a year. His assurances rest on procedure and volume, while Smilla’s questions are about the specific evidence and the possibility that Isaiah’s death has been too readily settled.

Complaint and Investigation

Smilla threatens to file a complaint, and the Toenail replies that she is free to do so. The dispute does not immediately resolve the difference between his institutional account and her suspicion. Instead, her complaint draws the attention of Ravn, an investigator for the district attorney, who says he has come because of the case’s nature and the thought-provoking letter she sent. His visit shows that an official challenge can move beyond the initial police contact, though it does not mean that the resulting inquiry will align with Smilla’s aims.

At Police Headquarters, Ravn brings Smilla to a low red barracks facing the harbor. The building has no sign, and the quiet interior, with no visible nameplates or familiar office bustle, gives the encounter a controlled, separate character. The setting belongs to the same law-enforcement apparatus she first approached for answers, but the balance of power has shifted: Ravn is no longer merely responding to a complaint but is showing her what information the authorities can obtain and how closely they can follow her.

Records, Reach, and Coercive Power

Ravn tells Smilla that the authorities can imprison her and place her in solitary confinement or an isolation tank, and that a judge would not hesitate after seeing her dossier. The threat is grounded in a display of reach: he has obtained information she sent to Greenland’s government and military, followed her movements, accessed archives, and summoned an intelligence officer at Christmastime. For Smilla, the meeting is about proving that the threat is operational rather than rhetorical. The police power that first appeared as a route to the morgue and the forensic report now appears as the power to assemble a file and restrict her freedom.

The novel also places this power within the broader administrative world surrounding the case. Juliane’s seven greasy envelopes contain the printed testimony of her life: clinic appointment slips, a birth certificate, tax documents, insurance papers, receipts, and official correspondence. Among them is a letter from the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark granting her a monthly widow’s pension after Norsaq Christiansen’s death. The papers are not police records, but they sharpen the contrast between the abundance of documentation governing a Greenlander’s life and the police’s quick reliance on a closed-case finding. Smilla’s challenge is not simply to obtain another form; it is to make a particular death count as a question rather than as one of many settled accidents.

Institutional Limits and Narrative Significance

The investigation into the 1991 deaths in Greenland offers a different example of how official procedure handles evidence. Lagermann explains that five healthy young people were found on the same day, August 7, 1991, and that botulinum toxin was identified only after blood and suspected food samples were sent to Copenhagen. The local medical laboratory in Godthåb lacked facilities for tracing less common toxins, so the samples went to the Serum Institute. This account concerns forensic and medical institutions rather than a direct police action, but it places the capital within a larger system through which evidence from Greenland must travel before it can be recognized.

Copenhagen Police therefore functions neither as a single voice nor as a simple guarantor of justice. The Toenail’s defense of a completed investigation, Ravn’s attention to Smilla’s complaint, and Ravn’s later demonstration of surveillance and confinement reveal distinct uses of institutional authority. For Smilla, the central conflict is whether official systems will examine the details she considers meaningful—or instead classify the case, archive her objections, and use their power to prevent further questions.