A Dangerous Point of View

A private detective is found stabbed to death in a seedy apartment, which is the sort of death his profession half expects. The puzzle is what he was actually doing there. For two weeks he'd been watching the building opposite. Two weeks of sitting in a grim room with binoculars and somebody else's secrets, and then a knife. Who was he watching, for whom, and how did any of it end like this?

The episode is built on that geography: one window looking at another. Van der Valk has to reconstruct the dead man's routine from the outside in, working out what he saw and, just as importantly, what he was paid to overlook. A watcher collects knowledge the way other men collect debts, and either can get you killed. The investigation widens out from the apartment to everyone connected to those two weeks of surveillance, because whoever hired him knew exactly what he'd learned. Surveillance turns out to be a strange thing to investigate, because every witness the police find has been watching something or someone themselves.

There's a nice irony at the centre of it. A man who made his living seeing things without being seen died in full view, and now it's the police doing the window work, studying his life instead of his subject's. I enjoyed that reversal more than I expected to. There is a professional courtesy in it too: the police sit and look and wait for the dead man, the way he once sat and looked for his clients.

Jeremy Paul wrote it with Nicolas Freeling, and Jim Goddard directed. Barry Foster leads as Van der Valk, Michael Latimer plays Kroon and Susan Travers is Arlette. Lois Baxter appears as Emma Holmeijer with Paul Hardwick as Holmeijer, Leon Vitali as Jos Busselink, Barrie Houghton as Henk Busselink, Stefan Kalipha as Hippy, Margaret Ward as Tutor and Sally Sanders as Mrs. Zondag.

Two weeks of watching somebody ends with everybody watching him. There's a moral in there somewhere, but the episode is too shrewd to say so out loud.