'Van der Valk' Recap: Season 4 Episode 3

Van der Valk airs Sundays at 9:00 pm and is available to stream via the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous episode and previous seasons.
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Van der Valk isn’t sleeping much, to the concern of his girlfriend Lena. He says he has a lot on his mind, and the obvious troubles of his coroner Hendrik can’t help. Hendrik has tested his own blood and thinks he has found something horrible – but he won’t tell Van der Valk. Instead, he’s surly while around his colleagues, making it impossible for Van der Valk not to notice something is wrong. The pill-popping is also a giveaway.

Van der Valk’s beloved car also sounds like it has some issues, as Lucienne comments while he drives her to a conference center. A woman named Gerda Schalk has been found dead there by her business partner Danielle Panhoff, seemingly killed with a smashed, bloodstained bottle.

The women were organizing a Global Wildlife Congress, and Gerda had stayed late to keep working. She campaigned against the illegal international trade in rare birds, and her body is found next to a mechanical bird exhibit on a floor that displays video. She seems to have written something in blood on the floor: “Col” or “Cob” or something like that.

The building’s CCTV was disabled just after midnight; that must have been when Gerda was killed. But nearby cameras catch other figures near the conference center around that time. Eddie thinks he recognizes one as Cobie Stegenga, a popular musician who is thought to have died by suicide two years ago. She always wore a blue feather in her ear in memory of her mother – and the woman caught on camera is doing the same. Could Gerda have been writing out the name of her killer in her own blood?

Cobie had some big hits and was gearing up for her first world tour when she disappeared, her car found parked near a flooding river. She suffered from depression, but her father Marcus has always insisted that she would not have killed herself. Eddie is a fan, and has always believed that she faked her own death to avoid the stress of the tour: Cobie was apparently afraid of crowds and outdoor spaces. She also withdrew 200 euros every day for a week before disappearing, and there have been unconfirmed sightings of her, including at a mental health clinic – but she vanished before she was helped there.

Van der Valk and Lucienne go to speak to Cobie’s father Marcus, who’s an artist. He keeps a bird in his studio – birds are the only thing that could calm Cobie during her panic attacks. Marcus insists that Cobie is alive: she was talking about new songs and bought a new bed soon before disappearing. Van der Valk shows him the image of the woman seen outside the conference center, and Marcus is sure it’s his daughter.

Despite Van der Valk’s request to keep the image a secret, Marcus releases it online, saying the police have confirmed a sighting of Cobie. Van der Valk and Lucienne run into his neighbor Anki and her son Jesse, and Jesse inveighs against whoever got Marcus’ hopes up by showing him the image. Jesse is sure that Cobie is dead; they grew up together, and she always contacted him on his birthday but hasn’t since she disappeared.

Anki says that someone helped Marcus identify the location of the image of his daughter, so he’s at the conference center looking for more information. Van der Valk and Lucienne head there. As Van der Valk chastises Marcus, the police dog Sniffer – who has been accompanying Van der Valk – starts to whine. Van der Valk lets him loose, and Sniffer chases Jay Waldock, a colleague of Gerda and Danielle.

Danielle was surprised to see Jay arriving at the conference center early that morning. He was trying to retrieve a bag he had hidden there – but was interrupted by Danielle’s shocked discovery of Gerda’s body. Gerda’s boyfriend Flinn Bovens has angrily called Jay and told him that they’re already late in delivering money to someone. Now Jay is retrieving the money, which is in the bag he hid at the conference center – but Sniffer smells it. Van der Valk and Lucienne bring Jay in for questioning.

The detectives don’t know of Jay’s connection to Flinn, although they did find Flinn oddly nervous while informing him of Gerda’s death. He admitted that he hadn’t seen Gerda for a few days despite sharing an apartment with her: they’ve been on a break, during which he has been staying at a friend’s. Gerda had been strange and distant recently, he said. He showed the detectives to their apartment – and the front door of the building had been broken into, while their apartment was open and ransacked.

Flinn does have an alibi confirmed by his boss: he was tending bar late into the night when Gerda was killed.

Danielle recognizes a man caught on camera near the conference center around the time of Gerda’s killing as someone she saw Jay speaking to at an airport in Sweden after a conference. The man refused to give his real name, asking to be called “Meatball.” But Jay denies any knowledge of the man, insisting that Danielle is misremembering things.

Eddie searches a database of known bird traffickers and finds one named Carl Simons who looks like Meatball. Furthermore, Carl spent three years in prison after a group including Gerda helped expose him as a trafficker. Confronted with this knowledge, Jay claims that he was just a middleman: he helped source and ship some songbirds, and the bag of cash was his payment. The detectives talk him into sharing Meatball’s address.

When they arrive at Meatball’s mobile home, they find the door open. Meatball bolts, and Eddie chases and fights him. When Van der Valk and Lucienne catch up in Van der Valk’s car, Meatball says that he didn’t do anything. He says that he thought he saw someone at the conference center last night.

A car plows him over before he can say more.