The Daughter was a Dancer

A trendy businessman wants a bodyguard, which is the sort of job a private detective takes when the phone rings and the money is right. Bulman takes it. But he arrives too late. A bodyguard is only as good as his timing, and the episode knows it. The client is dead, the assignment turns into a murder inquiry, and the trail keeps circling back to one name: a pretty dancer.

The episode works the familiar rhythm of private nose and public procedure, with DCS Jack Lambie on the police side of the fence. Mark McManus plays the institutional weight against Bulman's looser, older-school methods, and the contrast is quietly entertaining. The investigation follows the dead man's last days into the arts crowd, where the dancer at the centre of it all is handled carefully enough that the mystery keeps its shape until the end. The businessman's world is all bright surfaces and borrowed glamour, and the episode draws it with just enough detail to feel real.

Murray Smith wrote it and Ken Grieve directed, and they keep the tone squarely mid-paced, unhurried without being dull. Don Henderson's Bulman is at his most watchable when a case starts badly, because the character has a stubborn streak that treats a failed first attempt as an insult. Siobhan Redmond's Lucy McGinty keeps him honest, which is her real job in this one. The bodyguard detail is worth noting too: the show gives Bulman an actual trade skill, and the episode uses it to let him fail at the one thing that mattered.

The title promises something softer than the episode delivers. The dancer is a knot the investigation has to untie, and the story is better for refusing to make her simply tragic. She has her own reasons, and the mystery respects that.

A modest, solid hour of the partnership settling into its stride.