Man of Iron

Man of Iron starts with annoyance and ends with a body. An old friend of Van der Valk's finds himself the repeated victim of petty thefts, the kind that are cheap and pointless and easy to shrug off. Then, as these things do, it tips over: a murder, and a tangle of mistaken identities that keeps the detective busy untangling one thing from another.

The pleasure of the piece is in the small crimes pointing at something larger. A run of break-ins that look like nothing in particular turns out to be the front edge of a serious offence. Van der Valk has to sift through deceit and misdirection, and the confusion of who is who does half the work of hiding the truth. The old friend at the centre gives the case a personal pull without tipping into sentiment, and the episode keeps its focus tight on that one mystery rather than sprawling.

Barry Foster plays Van der Valk, with Joanna Dunham as Arlette and Nigel Stock as Samson. Jon Morrison is Henk Schönheim and Philip Sayer plays Paul de Groot. Morris Perry appears as Pastor Weevers. Michael Da Costa is Doff and Edward Burnham is Jakob Mertens. Robin Parkinson is the hotel receptionist and Dennis Blanch the patrolman. Michael Chapman and Nicolas Freeling wrote it; William Brayne directed.

What the story does well is show how a random little crime can pull a thread that leads somewhere nobody expected. The thefts are almost comic in their pettiness, which makes the turn to murder land harder. It is a neat reminder that in this Amsterdam, the trivial and the fatal often share an address.

And there is a certain satisfaction in watching Foster treat the small stuff with the same seriousness as the large. The mistaken identities, once unpicked, turn out to have been the whole point, and the reveal is the quieter for it.