Fleshmarket Close

A man from Kosovo is found dead in a seedy Edinburgh slum, a racist slur painted on his head. The obvious reading is a hate crime, and plenty of people are happy with that reading. Rebus is not one of them. Something about the scene keeps nagging at him, and he trusts that instinct over the easy answer. It would be a tidy case if it held, and the episode earns its keep by not letting it hold.

The case drags him down into the dirty underworld of the city's gangland bosses, the men who run the lives of the underprivileged and take their cut of everything. The clues are the unglamorous stuff of real policing: fingerprints, blood stains, odd looks, and a pair of unused tickets to a soccer match. They lead to another corpse. And the motives start multiplying. Sibling rivalry, a hidden passion, something more devious altogether, or nothing that anyone has thought of yet. Rebus keeps his options open, which is the honest way to police a case like this.

Running alongside is the report of a missing Kosovan girl, filed by a local MSP, last seen in the company of a known criminal who has also dropped off the map. The two threads never quite sit still, and the episode does not force them together. The girl's disappearance and the dead man's murder sit together in a way nobody at the station wants to examine too closely.

Ken Stott and Claire Price are the engine, with Jennifer Black's Gill Templer and a solid Edinburgh roster around them: Russell Anderson as Jacky Hines, Cora Bissett as Trudy Laing, June Brogan as Maisie, Tony Close as Bunny, Mark Cox as Jim Considine and Kate Donnelly as Sally Williams. Ross Allan rounds out the list as the Banehall policeman. Ian Rankin and Daniel Boyle wrote it, Matthew Evans directed.

The slur on the dead man's head turns out to be the least interesting thing about the case. That is the point, and it is well made.