Murder in Season

Eleanor Samson comes home to Glasgow to sing with Scottish Opera and, she hopes, to make peace with her estranged husband John. What she finds instead is Kirsty King, blonde and attractive and very much in John's life. The reunion goes badly. The argument never really stops. Then Kirsty's body is found in the burnt-out shell of John's boat, and Eleanor becomes the prime suspect.

Taggart cannot get behind the idea of Eleanor as a murderess, and his smooth assistant Peter Livingstone cannot get behind anything else. The two fall out over the case, and the episode enjoys watching the argument run. The evidence points one way and Taggart's reading of a woman he barely knows points another. Livingstone argues Eleanor's guilt with a solicitor's patience that does nothing for Taggart's temper. And there are other secrets in the family's orbit: John's son Graeme was having an affair with the dead woman, and elsewhere a plot against a girl called Lily goes hideously wrong before it does anyone any good.

Glenn Chandler wrote it, Peter Barber-Fleming directed. Mark McManus is DCI Jim Taggart, Alastair Duncan is DS Peter Livingstone, and Isla Blair is Eleanor Samson, with Martin Cochrane as John, Danny Hignett as Graeme, Andrew Keir as Frank Mullholland and Brenda Haldane as Kirsty King. Jimmy Martin is Mr. King and Ian McCulloch is Donald Martin, and Ken Stott is Dr. MacNaughten, years away from making dyspeptic Edinburgh detective work his own.

The opera setting gives everything a bit of gloss, and the mystery is fair. What sticks is the way the show lets Taggart be wrong about a suspect in a way he rarely is: he wants Eleanor innocent, and the episode makes him work for it. There is also the small pleasure of watching a cast of working Glasgow streets take itself to the opera house, even if the opera house is where the trouble starts. It suits him.