The First Stone

Hours before the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland is due to open, the Moderator-elect is found dead in a car in a cruising spot, naked, throat cut, with a female passenger beside him in a similar state. The area is notorious for lovers, which the police and the press both understand immediately. It is a scandal the church would have handled quietly at any other time. But there is no time now. The woman's jealous husband gets the first look from the police, and then a rival candidate for the moderator's job turns up dead as well, and the case stops being about one body.

Rebus digs into the church's habit of dealing with its own troubles internally, the instinct to protect its members and keep the story in the family. That instinct, the episode argues, is exactly what came back to haunt them. The sacred setting does not soften the violence; if anything it sharpens it, because everyone involved knows how much is at stake. Every minister he talks to manages to say nothing with great fluency.

Sandy Welch is Rev Andrew Mason, John Stahl is Rev Andrew McLeod, and Michael Carter is Rev John Carson, three men of the cloth who circle the investigation with varying degrees of helpfulness. Nick Farr is Donald Morrison and Ewan Stewart is Michael Walker, with Lorcan Cranitch's Thomas Steele, Andrew Neil's Ken Flatley and Carole Anders's nurse filling the edges. Ken Stott and Claire Price do the detecting, and Ian Rankin and Colin Bateman wrote the script, with Morag Fullarton directing.

The episode gets a lot of mileage out of the gap between what the church says and what it does, and the General Assembly looming in the background gives every interview a deadline. Nobody in a collar wants to be the one who talks, and that is exactly the wall Rebus is built to break. Rebus, as ever, is less interested in protecting institutions than in finding out what happened.

It is church politics as blood sport, and it is gripping.