Nest of Vipers

Two human skulls turn up at the site of a new by-pass road, and the team quickly works out that this is not archaeology. The remains lead them to a pharmaceutical company, and to someone with a strong interest in keeping the skulls unidentified. An interest strong enough to include murder. But the people who know what those bones mean will go to any length to keep the secret buried, and that urgency drives the whole episode.

The pressure on Taggart and Jardine builds from two directions at once. Corporate secrecy on one side, and on the other the desperate individuals who understand exactly what the skulls would reveal. Threat follows threat, and the case turns into a race to find the truth before it is buried again, this time for good. It is the kind of story where the danger grows with every answer, and nobody in it can be trusted to tell the whole truth.

Glenn Chandler wrote it, Graham Theakston directed. Mark McManus's Taggart is backed by James MacPherson's Jardine, with Ann Mitchell as Annie Gilmour, Ken Drury as Dr Nielson, Lorna Heilbron as Morag Nielson, Michael Cochrane as Derek Amlot, Leone Connery as Christine Gray and Jeremy Young as Prof Hutton. Blythe Duff and Iain Anders hold down the regular end as Jackie Reid and McVitie. The pharmaceutical angle gives the episode a corporate chill that sits oddly next to the mud of a building site.

A couple of bones on a building site seems like a small thing to hang a whole episode on, but the show somehow makes it feel enormous. The trick is that the people who want them kept buried are far more interesting than the bones themselves, and the ending lands with the weight of everything the case has been hiding.