A Death by the Sea

A midnight swim for two, and it goes wrong. By morning the husband is unconscious on the shore and his wife has vanished beneath the water. She's presumed drowned, which would be that, except Van der Valk doesn't buy it. He suspects something more than amorous intentions was at work that night, and he sets out to prove it.

The setup is a good one precisely because there's so little of it. No weapon, no body, no witnesses beyond the man who survived. Just a stretch of dark sea and a story told by the only person awake to hear himself tell it. Everything Van der Valk has to work with is assumption: hers, the locals', the husband's. Peeling those assumptions apart takes him into the lives of the people around the incident, where the obvious narrative starts coming apart at the seams. The sea keeps its own counsel, so the case has to be solved on land, in the small betrayals and kindnesses of the people who were there that night.

It's the sort of small-scale mystery the show does well, where the crime touches something human rather than merely clever. A couple went into the water in love or something like it, and only one came out. What actually happened between the beach and the morning is the whole episode. It is the kind of story Freeling's novels specialised in, where motive matters more than method.

Philip Broadley wrote it with Nicolas Freeling, and Don Leaver directed. Barry Foster leads as Van der Valk, Michael Latimer plays Kroon and Susan Travers is Arlette. Patrick Allen appears as Van Teeseling and Joanna Dunham as Lucienne, with Sydney Tafler as Halsbeek, Jack May as Minister, Mark Jones as Martin, Dave Carter as Stribos and Richard Simpson as a jeweller.

A drowned wife, an unconscious husband, and a detective who refuses to let the sea do the explaining. Season two starts on solid ground.