Destroying Angel

A prostitute walks into the station to report that a man is dying. Not a crime as such, more of a worry, but it gets Van der Valk and Kroon round to some rooms above a bar all the same. The police surgeon gives the man weeks, maybe less, and while he can't swear to it he agrees with the officers' hunch that poison may have had a hand in things.

So there's your case: somebody is killing a man who hasn't long to live anyway. It gets stranger. The police dig and find the dying man and an associate may have been dealing drugs, which at least sounds like motive territory. But what actually snags Van der Valk's interest is a very rare book, which tells you most of what you need to know about the man running this investigation. Then a routine fingerprint check comes back with something nobody was expecting. The dying man was supposed to have died already, in a car crash twenty years before. Whoever he is, he isn't who his fingerprints say, and the police are left guessing just who they've got upstairs in that room.

The episode handles this well. It starts with the smallest possible report and keeps widening out: a sick man becomes a poisoning, becomes drug dealing, becomes a dead man walking around under someone else's name for two decades. Each answer raises a better question, and the identity mystery sits nicely alongside the procedural legwork rather than crowding it out.

Michael Chapman and Nicolas Freeling wrote it, with Graham Evans directing. Barry Foster leads as Van der Valk and Michael Latimer is back as Kroon, with Susan Travers as Arlette, Artro Morris as Martin and Walter Brown as Mulder. James Cairncross plays Dr. Jagerman, George Howe is Sartorius, Richard Hurndall plays Picard, Patricia Quinn is Yvonne and Jonathan Newth appears as the Chemist.

A dying man poisoned by person or persons unknown, a rare book, and a fingerprint from a grave. I'd say that's a good week's work for a second episode.