Root of Evil

Someone is killing Glasgow's loan sharks, one by one. Taggart and Jardine take the case, and it draws them into the shabby end of the city's money business, where the victims are rarely missed and the suspects are everywhere. The victims are men who lived by lending trouble, and their business partners line up to grieve without anyone believing a word of it. The money business in Glasgow is a small world, and everyone in it knows everyone else's business before the police do. The killings themselves are almost the easy part. The hard part is what the case digs up on the people chasing it.

Taggart learns that his daughter's fiancé did time for armed robbery. Jardine is confronted with the news that an actress he knows once worked at a gentlemen's club. And the two Edinburgh detectives shadowing the case turn out to be less clean than they look, which puts the whole inquiry in a strange light. Everyone in the episode is carrying something, and the investigation becomes a slow peeling-back of the people doing the investigating.

Glenn Chandler wrote it, Peter Barber-Fleming directed. Mark McManus is DCI Jim Taggart and James MacPherson is DS Mike Jardine, with Celia Imrie as Helen Lomax, Kenny Ireland as Ken Lomax, John Kane as Mick Lomax and Gordon Kane as Willie Lomax. Emma D'Inverno is Julie Adamson, Peter Kelly is Robert Carrera, and Tom Mannion and Don Gallagher are the Edinburgh detectives, DS Scott and DS Hind.

It is the kind of episode that cares less about the guilty than about the people holding the torches. The loan sharks' deaths matter, but the secrets of the investigators matter more, and the show has the nerve to leave its own heroes looking frayed. Celia Imrie, in the days before Benidorm, is Helen Lomax, and she is good value as always. Uncomfortable viewing in the best sense.