Double Jeopardy

Rowena Bain's body is found in a wood. The forensic evidence points to suicide, and the timing makes it tidy: she was about to move to Germany with her family. Taggart is suspicious anyway. The victim's sister shares the feeling and says flat out that Rowena's husband Maurice is responsible, and from there the case goes abroad.

Taggart and Jardine head to Munich, convinced that Maurice Bain killed his wife and is carrying on with her daughter. And because Taggart's wife would ask questions, he brings her along without telling her the trip is work. Jean Taggart, in the passenger seat the whole way, becomes the audience's stand-in: she sees the trip, and she does not see the case, and the gap between the two is where the comedy and the dread both live. It is a domestic comedy of errors bolted onto a murder inquiry, and it works better than it has any right to.

The episode runs feature-length, which gives the story room to breathe and the German setting a chance to look properly foreign, a long way from the tenements of Glasgow. The Bain family portrait that emerges is not a pretty one.

Glenn Chandler wrote it, Jim McCann directed. Mark McManus is DCI Jim Taggart and James MacPherson is DS Mike Jardine, with James Laurenson as Maurice Bain, Sheila Ruskin as Pam Fleming, Valerie Gogan as Carol Bain and Rose McBain as Rowena Bain. Herbert Trattnigg and Claus Elßmann play the Geisslers, with Harriet Buchan as Jean Taggart and Alec Heggie as Frank Sweeney.

The Munich sections give the series a change of scenery it enjoys, and the central suspicion, an affair between a husband and his wife's daughter, is grim enough to carry the whole journey. The double jeopardy of the title is doing real work, with Taggart's own reputation riding on him being right. It is a long sit, and a satisfying one.