Hostile Witness

A by-election is running in Glasgow, and the far-right party contesting it wants the return of capital punishment. But the politics are only the backdrop: the candidate and her agent are both dead and half-naked, the work of the same killer. Murdering people who campaigned for hanging is a gift to the newspapers, and the newspapers know it. The party's supporters are the kind who send letters to the editor, and the episode has some quiet fun with them without ever losing sight of the bodies.

Taggart is pressed for a quick result he cannot deliver. The media want a name and Supt. McVitie is short of manpower. The obvious suspects, the agent's wife and her American boyfriend, have nothing the police can prove against them. Every interview in the campaign offices goes about as well as the last one, and the frustration on screen is real. The case becomes a wait for a mistake, and the episode has the patience to let it come.

Glenn Chandler wrote it, Haldane Duncan directed. Mark McManus is DCI Jim Taggart and James MacPherson is DS Mike Jardine, with Jan Carey as Joanna Gillan and Ian McCulloch as Donald Gillan. Neil McKinven is John Greeney, James Carroll Jordan is Sam Paris, Sandra Voe is Dr. Clyde and Robert McIntosh is James Little, with Aline Mowat and Joe Dunlop as the Hays.

The political talk stays in the background, which is sensible. This is really a story about what a campaign does to the people inside it, and how the spectacle of an election can hide a perfectly ordinary murder. The victims never get to speak for themselves, which gives the episode its uncomfortable edge. The wait for proof gives the final stretch a slow burn, and Taggart's quiet certainty is the engine of the whole thing. A decent, pressurised thriller.