the Toenail

The Toenail is an investigator involved in the official response to Isaiah’s death. He is distinguished by a flat, impatient manner and by his confidence in the initial account of the death: that Isaiah had been playing on the roof and had fallen accidentally. His encounters with Smilla show how quickly institutional judgment can close around a death that she believes deserves further scrutiny.

Encounter at the Scene

When the Toenail arrives on the roof with a photographer, Smilla and another man are already there. The investigator asks who they are and tells them to leave. After noticing the footprints, however, he turns his attention from the people on the roof to the evidence. The photographer begins taking pictures with a flash and a Polaroid camera, while the Toenail specifies that the prints belong only to the deceased.

He then draws an immediate conclusion about the circumstances: Isaiah’s mother is a drunk, he says, so the boy must have been playing up there. The sequence establishes his brisk, report-minded approach. He registers the footprints, but interprets them through an assumption about the family rather than treating the scene as an open question. Smilla, confused but unwilling to move, does not accept his order to go downstairs.

Official Position and Dispute

After the initial encounter, Smilla calls police headquarters and is transferred to Division A, where the Toenail takes the call. He directs her to the morgue and says she can speak with Loyen. This exchange places him in the practical role of gatekeeper between Smilla and the official investigation: he can point her toward the autopsy and the doctor, but he does not share her suspicion that the death needs a different explanation.

When Smilla challenges the handling of the case and raises the possibility of filing a complaint, the Toenail responds that the police do not discriminate and that they pursue cases thoroughly, whether the deceased is a poor person or a serious offender. He says he personally collected the forensic report and that it gives no indication of anything other than an accident. He also describes the death as tragic but places it among the 175 accidental deaths the authorities deal with each year. His defense rests on the report and on the ordinary scale of such cases; Smilla’s challenge, by contrast, is directed at the possibility that official normality has obscured what happened to this particular boy.

Narrative Role and Contrast

The Toenail’s characterization is brief and mediated through Smilla’s first-person account. At the scene, his compact judgments and irritation make him an immediately recognizable figure of official authority. The book does not give him a developed personal history or private perspective in these passages; his narrative function is to embody an investigation that has settled quickly on accident, while Smilla remains unable to accept that conclusion.

That contrast becomes clearer alongside Smilla’s reflections on life in Greenland. She recounts practical knowledge learned through her mother’s hunting and her own experience of obtaining food, and describes childhood as a life rarely spent indoors. She also explains that in Greenland a locked room can represent a particularly severe form of punishment, and identifies spatial freedom as something she fiercely protects. Elsewhere, she argues that understanding another culture comes through living in it, learning its language, and accepting that some forms of understanding remain wordless. These passages do not establish the Toenail’s views on Greenlandic culture; instead, they place his categorical judgment of Isaiah’s death against the more situated knowledge and attention to lived experience that shape Smilla’s outlook.