Deferred Sentence

A holiday on the island of Lagga Laggas should be a quiet escape, but Hamish has chosen his hosts badly. He stays with Father McPhail, the Catholic priest, and finds himself dropped into the middle of a religious feud with Enoch McDuff, the Protestant minister, that has the whole island keeping its distance from both men. The two clerics are shunned by the very people they serve, which is the first clue that something is very wrong on the island. To avoid being caught in the crossfire, Hamish does the only sensible thing: he pretends to be Jewish.

And the pretence lasts about as long as it takes Enoch's daughter Laura to make her allegation. Laura McDuff claims her mother was murdered twenty years ago, and the holiday turns into a busman's holiday whether Hamish likes it or not. It is the kind of claim that nobody on the island wants to hear, which makes it all the more worth hearing. The question of why the islanders shun his two hosts starts to look like part of the answer.

Daniel Boyle wrote it, Nicholas Renton directed, and it aired in March 1997. Caroline Paterson's Laura carries the mystery with a quiet insistence, and Tom Watson and Alan MacNaughtan give the feuding clerics proper weight as men the island has decided it cannot trust. Robert Carlyle plays Hamish's discomfort beautifully, a policeman pretending to be something he is not while everyone around him pretends right back. Colette O'Neil, Amanda Walker, Michael Byrne, Annie Louise Ross and Brian Alexander fill out the island, with Boyle himself appearing as a Handsome Sailor.

Twenty years is a long time for a secret to sit, and the episode lets it surface at its own pace. It is a rare outing with almost none of the regulars, and the change of scenery does the show good. The island keeps its mystery, but Hamish leaves with more than he arrived with.