Fraud Division of the Copenhagen District Attorney's Office

The Fraud Division of the Copenhagen District Attorney’s Office is the unit associated with Ravn’s investigation and his encounters with Smilla. Though first identified through an ordinary office listing, it becomes a marker of authority that can move between public complaint procedures and the coercive reach of the state. Its anonymous settings and Ravn’s shifting institutional position give it a deliberately unstable presence: at once an office to call and a power whose limits Smilla cannot readily see.

Identification and First Encounter

The division enters the story through Ravn, whom Smilla meets on a deserted roof during the workers’ lunch break. He is short, bundled in an oversized gray coat whose padded shoulders make him look like a child in a costume, and gaunt enough that his face is compared to a mummy; despite this exhausted appearance, his eyes remain alert. He says he has stopped by because of the nature of Smilla’s case and her thought-provoking letter of complaint. His visit makes the division’s interest personal, but leaves its exact motives and procedures unclear.

That first appearance already complicates the idea of a routine complaint. Ravn says cases normally go to a local board, while his attention to this one is an exception. The division is therefore introduced not through a formal statement of jurisdiction but through a deviation from the usual route: the complaint has attracted an investigator who chooses to appear himself. The scene offers no assurance that this attention will benefit Smilla; it establishes only that the case has acquired institutional notice.

A Name in the Directory

Later, Smilla looks up the Copenhagen district attorney’s office on Jens Kofods Street. She does not have a settled plan for the call. She wants, at minimum, to tell Ravn that she has not been fooled or given up, and intends to make clear that she is watching him. Her attempt to reach him, however, meets an unexpected obstacle: a woman answering the phone says there is no one by that name working there.

The denial makes the division feel less like a transparent office than a name that may not be available to the public in the ordinary way. Smilla stalls on the line, breathing into the receiver, before asking whom she is speaking to. The answer is that the person she means works in the fraud division. The woman is delighted by the exchange and treats it as a Christmas story for the following morning’s coffee and pastry. For her, the call is an amusing workplace incident; for Smilla, it confirms that Ravn can be reached only through a less obvious institutional identity. Their sharply different readings expose the gap between everyday office routine and the stakes of Smilla’s investigation.

The Division and the Police Headquarters

The division’s institutional surroundings are not presented as a conventional, bustling police office. When Smilla later arrives at Police Headquarters with Ravn, the car passes red-brick buildings housing the Division of Motor Vehicles and heads toward a low red barracks facing the harbor. The building has no sign, and the party encounters no staff, typewriters, or nameplates. Its quiet is compared to a reading room or the morgue beneath the Institute of Forensic Medicine. From a dark office with venetian blinds, the docks, the water, and Iceland Wharf are visible through the slats.

The passage locates Ravn’s work inside a broader police environment without making the Fraud Division and Police Headquarters interchangeable. Instead, the anonymous barracks gives the investigation a subdued, hard-to-read setting: the apparatus is present, but ordinary public markers of institutional identity are absent. Smilla’s view through the blinds further frames official space as a place from which the harbor can be watched while remaining partly concealed from view.

Authority and Coercion

By the time Ravn confronts Smilla about her attempts to interfere with the investigation, his relationship to the district attorney’s office has changed. Smilla reminds him that he had promised to look into the case when he was still working for the Copenhagen district attorney. Ravn then threatens that the authorities can imprison her at any time, place her in solitary confinement or an isolation tank, and do so without a judge hesitating once he has seen her dossier.

The threat gives the division’s earlier obscurity a more forceful meaning. Ravn has demonstrated that he can obtain information Smilla sent to Greenland’s government and the military, follow her movements, consult archives, and summon an intelligence officer even at six o’clock on a Christmas evening. The narrative presents these capacities as part of the intimidation directed at her, not as a neutral account of ordinary departmental procedure. The office’s authority is conveyed through what Ravn can make happen and what he claims the state can do, rather than through a visible chart of its structure.

The Fraud Division’s significance therefore lies in the contrast between its modest point of entry and the reach it comes to represent. It begins as an answer to a complaint and a destination in a phone book; it is later associated with a quiet, unmarked police setting and with threats backed by surveillance, records, and confinement. Ravn’s changing position—from investigator who visits Smilla because her complaint is unusual to former district-attorney employee who warns her that she can be locked away—makes the institution’s boundaries feel uncertain. For Smilla, the machinery she hoped might respond to her complaint becomes inseparable from the machinery that can monitor and silence her.