Thicker Than Water

A young English aristocrat is pulled from an Amsterdam canal, dead, and his mother's first reaction is the thing that stays with you. She shows almost no interest in who killed him. Van der Valk and Kroon take the case, and the absence of a grieving family turns out to be the most useful clue they have.

The work, then, is not about catching a killer in a hurry but about reconstructing the dead man. He had a life that his background never advertised, and following it leads the two detectives out of the respectable drawing rooms and down into the transvestite clubs and bars he actually frequented. That part of Amsterdam is where the real portrait emerges, piece by piece, and where the question of who he was starts to matter more than the tidy fact of how he died. Kroon, the steadier of the pair, takes the canvassing in his stride. Van der Valk is the one who keeps coming back to the mother's calm face.

What gives the hour its strange pull is the gap between the title he was born with and the life he chose. The mother's indifference is never explained away. And perhaps that's the point: some families lose each other long before anyone drowns. David Leland's Madame Arthur and Billy Hamon's Saskia give the nightlife its texture, while Pauline Letts's Muriel Hackforth and Richard Smith's Peter Hackforth sit on the respectable side of the line, watching the investigation from a distance.

Geoffrey Gilbert and Nicolas Freeling wrote it, with David Wickes directing. Barry Foster is Van der Valk, Michael Latimer his Kroon, and Susan Travers's Arlette and Martin Wyldeck's Samson fill the squad, with Joyce Heron as Hilda Ruysbroek and Michael Lees as Dr. Hans Roest.

The episode is quieter than its premise suggests. A body in a canal ought to mean a rush; here it means a slow walk through a life nobody in his family wanted to see. That restraint is the thing I like about it.