Wolf

Wolf opens on a scene that ought to make a detective's job easy and instead makes it harder. A young German is found murdered in his bed, and the apartment around him is stuffed with clues. So many, in fact, that Van der Valk starts to wonder whether there is one clue too many, and whether the killer has left this trail on purpose to point at himself.

That doubt is the spine of the hour. Most murders leave too little; this one leaves a stage set. Every object in the room seems to mean something, and the very abundance is what feels wrong. Van der Valk has to decide which details are honest and which were placed for him to find. The killer, if the theory holds, has taken the trouble to build a false story for whoever comes after, and the satisfaction of the episode is watching the detective pick it apart. The evidence feels almost arranged, and that is the unease the episode trades in.

Barry Foster leads as Van der Valk, with Joanna Dunham as Arlette and Nigel Stock as Samson. James Grout is Joseph Kolmaar and Lorna Heilbron plays Magda Kolmaar. Sam Dastor appears as Paul and John Price as Ressel. Bernice Stegers is Anna Kuylen. Pamela Moiseiwitsch is Miss Schaar and Matthew Guinness plays the finger-print expert. Philip Broadley and Nicolas Freeling wrote it; Mike Vardy directed.

What the story really tests is judgement rather than legwork. Anyone can collect the clues. The harder trick is knowing the one that was planted, and refusing to be herded toward the identity the murderer wants. It is a puzzle box, but one built to measure the detective rather than the audience.

And it is a cool piece of construction, the kind that rewards a viewer who pays attention to what is left in plain sight. The answer, when Van der Valk reaches it, arrives with the calm of a man who simply refused to be told where to look.