Dead Souls

Rebus is not having a good week. A colleague he genuinely admired is dead, found in circumstances that read as suicide, and Rebus cannot make himself accept the reading. Around that loss the usual Edinburgh horrors pile up: suspicions of paedophilia, child abuse, missing persons, a firebomb, an angry mob, and a gay cross-dresser whose part in it all is anyone's guess. Then an ex-girlfriend from twenty years back turns up with an offer he cannot refuse, and the past starts pulling at him from two directions at once.

The colleague's death is the load-bearing wall of the episode. Rebus keeps pulling at it, convinced there is more than despair to it, and the old friends who arrive asking him to find their missing teenage son add another weight to the pile. The woman he loved two decades ago is still able to light him up, and he juggles all of it the way he does everything: badly but doggedly.

Mark Bonnar plays the dead man, DI Jim Margolies, with Hugh Ross as Dr. Joe Margolies and Emma Currie as Katherine Margolies. Michelle Fairley is Janice Mee, Paul Cunningham is her brother Barney, and Russell Barr is Darren Rough. Around them stand Sara Stewart's DCI Gill Templer, Ron Donachie's DCS Wilson and Gayanne Potter's DS Siobhan Clarke. Ian Rankin and Stuart Hepburn wrote it, Maurice Phillips directed, and John Hannah carries the whole thing.

The episode is crowded, sometimes to the point of chaos, and that feels deliberate. Nothing is resolved with a flourish. It gets resolved with shoe leather and stubbornness. Rebus's work and his heart keep colliding, and he sorts the cases out well enough to keep going. But where the reclaimed affection will leave him is a question the show leaves open.

It is a working man's portrait, and a fair one. The ending refuses to hand him an answer, which is the most honest thing in it.