The Rainbow Ends Here

A teenage girl is snatched on her way to a secret meeting with a married man, and Van der Valk is set the job of getting her back. The married man turns out to be the helpful sort, ready to do anything the commissaris asks. But the trouble comes from a different quarter entirely: the girl's brother, a hotel tycoon, seems readier to work with the kidnappers than against them.

That inversion is the engine of the hour. A missing-person case usually has the family begging for results; here the brother's cooperation is offered to the wrong side, and the suspicion creeps into every room Van der Valk walks into. The police themselves stop feeling like a safe base, because the question of whose side someone is on stops having an obvious answer. Lalla Ward's Judith Stolle and Donald Burton's Evert Stolle sit at the heart of it, with Prunella Ransome's Astrid and Jim Norton's Eddy moving through the edges of the plot, and Robert Swann's Paul and Margaret Ashcroft's Marlies Kernkamp filling in the world the girl came from. Kroon, as ever, wants the straightforward reading. Van der Valk knows better than to take it.

What makes it uneasy is the way loyalty gets performed rather than felt. The brother smiles and assists and somehow helps the abduction along. Van der Valk, who likes a clear line between guilty and innocent, has to do his work in a fog of willing helpers and reluctant ones. Michael Atkinson's bank manager is a small turn, but he fits the same pattern: everyone has a reason for what they say, and none of the reasons quite line up.

Philip Broadley and Nicolas Freeling wrote it, and Graham Evans directed. Barry Foster leads as Van der Valk, with Michael Latimer's Kroon and Susan Travers's Arlette alongside him.

The episode is less about who took the girl than about who quietly lets them. That's a colder sort of story, and the show tells it without flinching.