Violent Delights

Philip Dempster is a sixth former with a crush on his French teacher, Francoise Campbell, and a telescope he really should not have pointed anywhere near her house. What he sees through it looks like a murder involving her husband, and he becomes the prime witness to it whether he likes it or not. The telescope gives the whole thing a peeping Tom atmosphere that never quite goes away. The case starts with teenage curiosity and ends with Taggart, Jardine and the newly promoted DC Jackie Reid digging up a graveyard.

The prime suspect is an undertaker who declines to say where he disposed of the parts of a mutilated body. His silence leaves the team with no choice but to exhume the lot, which is grim work by any standard. And because nothing about this case is simple, one of the deceased turns out to be Jean Taggart's Aunt Hettie, a relative Jim has never had much time for. She dies during the episode, and the undertaker who buries her is the very man holding all the secrets. The family inconvenience is exquisite.

Glenn Chandler wrote it, Alan Macmillan directed. Mark McManus leads as Taggart, with James MacPherson as Jardine, Florence Guérin as Francoise Campbell, Tom Smith as Philip Dempster and Blythe Duff as Jackie Reid. Ronald Fraser plays Angus Collins, John Dougall is Andy Collins, Paul Thomas Hickey is Tony Jacovelli, Natalie J. Robb plays Sheila MacIntosh, and Iain Anders is McVitie.

There is a darkly funny streak running through all of it, the sort that British television does better than anyone. A graveyard full of bodies and a despised aunt buried by the wrong undertaker. Sometimes the most unsettling discoveries are the ones closest to home, and this episode knows exactly where home is, and how close the dark stuff can get to it.