Strip Jack

Gregor Jack has the sort of reputation that is built to be knocked down: a millionaire philanthropist who chairs a conference on African poverty. The eve of that conference finds him in a brothel, caught in a police raid with a prostitute called Anna. It is the kind of fall that tabloids dream about, and it is only the start.

But his wife Liz is found dead in a river, and Gregor moves from embarrassment to murder suspect in one jump. A second woman's body turns up in a connected incident, and Rebus is suddenly running a double murder enquiry through the drawing rooms of inherited money. The people around Jack close ranks, and the deeper Rebus digs, the more carefully they close them. The glossy surface of his world hides a murky past, and Rebus picks at it the way he picks at everything, patiently and without asking permission.

Gary Lewis plays Jack with the easy charm of a man who has never had to be accountable, and it is a pleasure to watch Rebus refuse to be charmed. Annette Westwood is Anna, the prostitute at the centre of the raid; Emma Currie is Angela Jack; Leigh Biagi is the dead Liz; Robert Stuart is Jeff Curt; Andy Clark is Kevin Urquart; and Joanne Froggatt turns up as Gail Maitland. Jennifer Black's Gill Templer and Claire Price's Siobhan Clarke keep the station side of things moving. Ian Rankin and Robert Murphy wrote it, Matthew Evans directed.

The episode's real interest is the gap between what Jack appears to be and what he is, and the river claims the woman who knew the difference. Rebus does not solve the mystery so much as wear it down.

It is a story about privilege and the price of it, told with the usual Edinburgh weather. There is no tidy moral, just a rich man's mess and the bodies left in it.