One Herring's Not Enough

A man walks into an Amsterdam police station and confesses to killing his wife and her lover, whom he found in bed together. He says he shot them both. Open and shut. Except Inspector Johnny Kroon goes round to the flat and finds nothing wrong with it at all. No bodies. No signs of a struggle. Nothing.

Boersma, confronted with the facts, does the sensible thing: he decides he must have had some sort of breakdown and imagined the whole business. Most detectives would take the paperwork and go home. Van der Valk doesn't. As one part after another of the man's story fails to check out, he starts to suspect there's something far more complicated going on underneath the supposed delusion. A confession that doesn't fit the evidence is more interesting than one that does, and he knows it.

That tension between what everyone is willing to accept and what keeps nagging away carries the whole episode. It's a quiet sort of mystery. There's no body, so no funeral, no grieving relatives, no obvious reason anyone should have lied in the first place, and the pleasure comes from watching a careful man refuse to be fobbed off. The show announces its method here: observation first, skepticism always, action only when it has earned its place.

It was written by Michael Chapman and Nicolas Freeling, whose novels the whole series grew out of, and directed by Dennis Vance. Barry Foster is Van der Valk, with Michael Latimer as Kroon and Susan Travers as Arlette. Clifford Rose plays Boersma, and there are early appearances for Michael Turner as Dr. Smeding, Alan Haines as Brigadier Mertens, Dave Carter as Brigadier Stribos and Colin McCormack as a sailor.

As a calling card for a new series it does the job well. A case that shouldn't exist, a detective who trusts his own unease over a tidy explanation, and Amsterdam doing quiet atmospheric work in the background. I like that the first thing the show ever asks us to believe is a murder with no victim.