The Adventurer

A deadly car crash ought to be a clean, closed thing, but this one leaves Van der Valk flummoxed and a little afraid, which is not his usual register. The victim was carrying two odd items: a gun, and a photograph of a local stonemason. Neither belongs in a straightforward accident, and the combination nags at him. A detective who is frightened is a detective worth watching, because fear means he has seen something the rest have agreed not to see.

What follows is a study in being ignored. Van der Valk takes his worry to the people who ought to share it, and finds no takers. The stonemason himself, offered police protection, waves it off. Everyone prefers the crash to stay a crash. But Van der Valk can't walk away, and the episode is built on that stubbornness more than on any twist. The gun and the photograph sit at the centre of the frame, and the question of why a dead man had them becomes the only question worth asking once you notice how hard everyone works to forget them. Kroon, predictably, would rather the file were closed. Van der Valk won't close it.

Paul Eddington's Wolf Gebhardt and Harold Goldblatt's Paul Moen give the closed ranks of the community their faces, and Norman Scace's Officer of Justice represents the official shrug. William Ellis's Vittorio Farrugia and Roger Bizley's Mahmud Fazan drift through the edges. The pleasure of the hour is watching Van der Valk refuse the comfort of an open-and-shut verdict, even when every door is politely shut in his face.

Michael Chapman and Nicolas Freeling wrote it, with Peter Duguid directing. Barry Foster leads as Van der Valk, Michael Latimer's Kroon and Susan Travers's Arlette beside him, and Alan Haines returning as Mertens, with Christian Thorogood as the Patrolman.

It's a small, uneasy story, and I think that's its strength. A man dies in a wreck, and the interesting part isn't the wreck. It's the silence around the two things he was holding when he did. The best Van der Valk stories are the ones where he trusts the silence less than the evidence, and this is one of them.