Out of Bounds

A skeleton found in the grounds of an exclusive boys' school turns out to be sixty years old, linked to the disappearance of a school master in 1939. The team is suddenly investigating a pre-war case, and then the master's successor is murdered. The old boys' network closes ranks, and when another master is killed, the past stops being history and starts being evidence. The school grounds are the kind of setting that does half the work of any mystery, all old stone and held breath. A case this old has a way of being reopened for the wrong reasons.

But the school is the real obstruction, and the old boys' network knows it. An institution this old keeps its secrets in its architecture, and the show leans on that without overstating it. The masters close ranks in the way institutions do, polite and immovable. The episode is patient with its clues, which rewards the same patience in the viewer.

Jardine's team has to dig through decades of silence to connect the deaths, and the episode never lets the modern case forget the old one. It is a two-timeframe case done properly, the kind where the school remembers everything and admits nothing. The old case provides the shape, and the modern murders sharpen it. There is a quiet menace in the school's refusal to explain itself.

Glenn Chandler wrote it, Sarah Hellings directed. James MacPherson, Blythe Duff and Colin McCredie lead, with Iain Anders as McVitie and Robert Robertson as Dr Andrews. Jeremy Clyde's Charles Brown, Susan Brown's Jan Dickson, Robert Gwilym's Alex Milligan, Michael Troughton's Derek Halliday and Thomas Wheatley's Douglas Fleming complete the cast.

Sixty years of silence is a lot to dig through, and the episode keeps the digging interesting. It is the rare episode where history is not just decoration.