Dutch detective Van Der Valk after brief encounter with young girl whose father had died in a car crash stumbles upon deserted white Mercedes with open door and a key in lock. Curious about that, he crosses the street and enters into house where he finds dead body. Nothing whatsoever points to dead man's identity, nor there are any clues in the house. After some investigation he finds that house was rented from some baron. Then he find dead man's name and also that he was spending time in some cottage up the hills. But again no clue comes to what this man was or who killed him. So he decides to cross the border to Germany where he find that he was a smuggler. He was smuggling butter. And he was living in Belgium under another name. So, Van Der Valk thinks, this man had two identities, one in Holland and another in Belgium. He finds his wife who runs a hotel in Brussels but she proves too hard nut to crack. Eventually it comes to light that this man assumed identity of a dead man, who died in Germany during the war, and therefore he was free of his Belgium identity, free to smuggle butter in Holland. He was a criminal. But his mistake was falling in love with a silly girl, girl who worked as a mechanic in an automobile repair shop. The same girl Van Der Valk encountered when her father died in a car crash. She found about his wife, and madly jealous, went to the house in Mercedes and knifed him, as she later told to Van Der Valk. He tried to confort her, telling her he was a criminal, and let her go free. Very good crime novel, and somewhat exotic, being set in Holland and Belgium.
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