Forbidden Fruit

Joan Matheson arrives in Glasgow to be with her daughter, who is expecting her first child. A happy family visit, on the face of it. But then Joan learns the baby was conceived by donor insemination, and she reacts very badly. Shortly afterwards she is found murdered, and suspicion falls on her son-in-law, the man she blamed and humiliated in front of the whole family. The humiliation at the family meeting is the kind of scene that stays with you, and what should have been a celebration turns into a quarrel that does not end well.

It is a bizarre case, wrapped around a fertility clinic and everything that modern medicine can stir up in a family. Taggart and Jardine are left to pick through the grief and the resentments, trying to work out which of them turned violent first. A case like this one has no shortage of motives, and that is precisely the problem. The victim's own history turns out to matter more than anyone first thinks, and the answer is not the obvious one.

Glenn Chandler wrote it, Mike Vardy directed. Mark McManus is Taggart, James MacPherson is DI Jardine, Blythe Duff is Jackie Reid. Tony Doyle is Dr Colin Millar, Maureen O'Brien is Ruth Millar, Hilary Maclean is Cathy Adams, Paul Goodwin is Martin Adams, Alastair Duncan is DS Peter Livingstone, with Iain Anders as McVitie and Harriet Buchan as Jean Taggart. The clinic staff are drawn with a quiet sympathy that keeps them human.

The family veneer does not survive contact with the truth, and the episode is quietly grim about it. Some secrets should stay buried. This one does not, and the killer's reasoning makes a kind of horrible sense once it is out. It is a sombre watch, and it earns that tone.