Death Call

A wealthy landowner's wife is found strangled and weighted down with luggage at the bottom of a reservoir. Her husband was last seen heading for Switzerland with a large sum of money in a holdall. It looks like the start of a simple story about money and marriage, and it is anything but. The holdall full of money does not make it to Switzerland, which is the first sign that the picture is wrong. The investigation keeps widening until it reaches a ring of illegal baby traders, which is about as far from a domestic row as a case can travel.

There are threads here that never quite tidy themselves. A man called Jamie McCormack sees his involvement turn out to be unfounded. And there is the phone call: the victims were nervously expecting a call on the day they died, and nobody in the episode can say what it meant. That call is the mystery at the heart of the story, and it is the kind of small ordinary detail the show does best. The answer, when it arrives, is a quiet horror that lands harder than any of the violence.

Glenn Chandler wrote it, Haldane Duncan directed. Mark McManus is DCI Jim Taggart and Alastair Duncan is DS Peter Livingstone, with Anne Kristen as Frances Greig, Alan Cumming as Jamie McCormack, Jill Meager as Helen Mendoza and Julie Graham as Kathleen Kelly. Michael Carter, Juliet Cadzow, John Cairney and Brigitte Kahn make up the rest of the cast. It is worth saying that the young Alan Cumming is already doing interesting work in a small part.

The reservoir scene is properly grim, and the baby-trader link gives the whole thing a cold, commercial feel that suits the title. The Swiss husband makes a decent red herring along the way. The Glasgow of this one is all docks and drizzle, which never hurts. It is a sturdy outing, the kind the series turned out without breaking a sweat.