Babushka

The murder of a wealthy Glasgow businessman leads Jardine's team to the Anastasia Agency, which supplies mail order brides, or women to order, depending on how you look at it. The city takes on a Russian flavour for the duration, and the case turns out to be about more than one dead man. The businessman's death is the entry point, but the agency is the story, and the story is a nasty one. For a show that usually keeps its eyes on Glasgow's own streets, a trip into this corner counts as exotic. The case is a reminder that the city's respectable corners have their own versions of the underworld.

But the agency is the heart of it. Jardine, Reid and Fraser pull at its operations, trying to work out who killed the businessman and what the agency is protecting. The episode keeps the two questions tied together, because the second one is where the danger lives. The women who come through the agency are treated as goods, and the episode is clear-eyed about what that means. The team has to decide how far the agency's reach goes before someone else dies.

The mail-order bride angle could have been lurid, and the show mostly keeps it sad and businesslike, which is worse in the right way. Simone Bendix's Irina Terechova and Richard Lintern's Martin Fairbairn give the agency most of its colour. The Russian flavour is mostly atmosphere, and the episode stays personal because of it.

Glenn Chandler and Robert Smith wrote it, Derek Lister directed. James MacPherson, Blythe Duff and Colin McCredie lead, with Iain Anders as McVitie and Robert Robertson as Dr Andrews. Frances Grey's Caroline Page, Paul Ireland's Duncan Stewart and Adam Bareham's Jeffrey Mulligan complete the cast.

It is a solid case with an uncomfortable subject, and the show does not look away from either. It does not lecture, which is a relief.