A Question of Blood

The scene at the college is a mess of spattered blood and bullet holes, and the tally is three dead: two schoolboys and a sports supervisor. It should be a simple kind of shooting. They rarely are. Then Rebus finds out one of the boys is the son of his own cousin, and the case stops being just another job.

But Rebus being Rebus, he does not step back from the thing that has hit his family. He steps forward, pushing to connect a member of Edinburgh's criminal fraternity to the shooting, and his superiors do not like it. DCS Gill Templer has the excuse she needs: the family connection makes him a liability, so she takes him off the case. It changes nothing. Rebus keeps working the thread he trusts, a schoolgirl named Teri Cotter who he is certain holds the key to the day. Being taken off a case is, for Rebus, mostly a paperwork problem.

Karen Gillan plays Teri with a guarded sharpness that makes the theory easy to believe, in one of those early roles that fans of her later work will clock instantly. Around them, James Cunningham is Marty Fairstone and Andrew Barr is Jez Peacock Johnson, with Paul di Rollo as his solicitor. Ciaron Kelly and Jack Lyons fill out the college, and John McQuiston is the sergeant. Ken Stott and Claire Price anchor it all, and Ian Rankin and Matthew Evans wrote the script, with Evans directing as well.

The episode is sharpest when it watches Rebus work a case he has been ordered off. The grief is there, but it does not slow him down, and the schoolgirl at the centre of it all is a reminder that the best witness is often the one nobody thinks to ask. The order to stand down never once reads as if it will hold, and Stott plays that defiance without making a show of it.

It is a taut one, and it leaves its bruises.