Accidental

Accidental builds its mystery around a vanishing. Rokin, the Chief Prosecutor at the centre of an international scandal over corruption in high places, simply disappears. The question Van der Valk has to answer is the ugly one: whether the man has been bought off by the villains he was supposed to be putting away. The scandal itself is the sort that touches government, which only raises the temperature.

The set-up lets the episode sit in a particular kind of unease. This is not a body in a canal but a senior figure of the law gone missing while the scandal around him thickens. Van der Valk is left weighing whether Rokin walked away under his own steam or was paid to vanish. Arlette and Berger are left trying to piece together what happened, and the net of suspicion widens to everyone who touched the case. The betrayal, if it happened, comes from inside the building, and that is what makes the inquiry feel personal.

Barry Foster leads as Van der Valk, with Joanna Dunham as Arlette and Nigel Stock as Samson. Freddie Jones is Joop Pater and Hildegard Neil plays Dr. Else Rokin, while Patrick Troughton takes Father Bosch and Hubert Rees is Berger. Peter Godfrey appears as Prof. Zeller. William Russell is Kees Rokin and Mary Healey plays Berte Merks. Ted Childs and Nicolas Freeling wrote it; Tom Clegg directed.

What gives the hour its weight is the suggestion that the institution itself has failed. A chief prosecutor does not simply drop out of sight, and the silence where he should be forces everyone to wonder who else might be compromised. The corruption is not a distant headline but something that reaches into the room where Van der Valk works.

And the performance worth singling out is Troughton's Father Bosch, a small role he fills with more presence than it strictly needs. The episode is tidy television, but tidy in the right way: it uses one man's absence to make the whole edifice of justice feel suddenly shaky.