Legends

The Adders were a sixties pop group, and twenty-five years on they are still generating corpses. Rick Mulvey, their former lead guitarist, turns up dead in a country house swimming pool. Then Superintendent McVitie receives an anonymous letter claiming the original singer, Jamie Connelly, was murdered back when he died on tour. The police start taking the idea of an exhumation seriously. The letter arrives at just the moment the new death makes the old one worth reopening.

But the old mystery is the real pull, and the swimming pool death is where it surfaces. Jardine and Reid get the case. Around them, other trouble simmers. Ian Garvey, Kate McCready's boyfriend, is savagely beaten by two bouncers, and the day after that Jackie Reid knocks him down with her car. It is the kind of week where nothing happens neatly. The Garvey business runs alongside the main case without ever swamping it, which is the right balance for an opening episode.

The case is heavy with faded pop fame and old grudges, and the death predates most of the team. The paperwork comes with dust on it. The nostalgia is handled without getting sentimental, which is the right call for a show this grey. There is a decent melancholy in the idea of a band nobody quite remembers being dragged back into the news.

Glenn Chandler and Barry Appleton wrote it, Alan Macmillan directed. James MacPherson and Blythe Duff lead, with Iain Anders as McVitie, Robert Robertson as Dr Andrews and Colin McCredie as Stuart Fraser. Barbara Dickson's Marie McDonald, Michael MacKenzie's Larry Bain, Ben Robertson's Alec Veerman, Benny Young's Roddy Ferguson and Natalie J. Robb's Kate McCready fill out the list.

The anonymous letter keeps the old case nagging at the new one, and the exhumation question hangs over everything. It's a decent start to a new series, with familiar faces and fresh bodies in the same grey Glasgow weather.