Still Waters

Piet is barely into his holiday when the phone finds him. The job is political, and vaguely embarrassing for his superiors: a proposed sea barrier, a vast national project, has run into opposition that someone wants quietly smoothed away. Piet is meant to take the sharp edges off. Instead he finds them.

The protesters are led by a radical offshoot calling itself the Green Force, and at first they look like the usual nuisance. They are not. Under the rows about the coastline sits a rotten core: blackmail, corruption, a drug trade, and before long a body. The bigger the project, the more people with a reason to keep its secrets, and Piet wades into all of them. The water, as the title promises, is still only on the surface, and the longer he looks, the more he dislikes what sits underneath. He was sent to pour oil on troubled water and comes back with the whole pond on his shoes.

Barry Foster is Van der Valk, with Meg Davies as Arlette, Ronald Hines as Samson, and Richard Huw as Wim. James Laurenson plays Paul Kortman, Oliver Ford Davies is Guus Kroese, Celia Imrie is Marijke Dekker, Stephanie Turner is Els Kortman, Angela Bruce is Tony Vishnu, and John Vine is Jan Klees. Nicolas Freeling and Stuart Hepburn wrote it; Herbert Wise directed.

I rather enjoy the scale here. The case starts as a favour and grows into something with real weight, and the writing is happy to let the politics be dull and the crime be ugly. Celia Imrie and James Laurenson give the opposition some genuine conviction, which keeps the moral picture from lining up too neatly. As the closing story of the revival, it leaves Piet knee-deep in the mess he was meant to tidy, which feels about right. Not a grand farewell, just another case that refused to stay small.