A Few Bad Men

A soldier is murdered while doing his rounds at the barracks, and Jardine investigates alongside Sergeant Tom Renshaw, who abuses his men rather than question them. Meanwhile the new arrival, DI Robbie Ross, teams up with Jackie Reid to look into counterfeiters at a race meeting, after a racehorse disappears. The two cases turn out to be tied together by a theft and a murder from thirteen years earlier. The barracks setting gives the episode a closed, hierarchical world to poke at, and the army does not appreciate it.

But the racecourse is where the new blood comes in. Ross arrives with a chequered past, and John Michie makes the character land from his first scene. Renshaw, by contrast, is the kind of copper the show is usually happy to criticise, and Paul McNeilly plays him with the right amount of self-regard. The two investigations run parallel for most of the running time, and the join, when it comes, is worth waiting for.

The linking of the barracks murder and the racing case gives the episode a long fuse, and the thirteen-year-old crime explains more than the present one does. There is a satisfying patience to the way the two threads are brought together. The old crime sits under the whole episode like a floorboard that will not stay quiet.

Glenn Chandler and Julian Spilsbury wrote it, Richard Holthouse directed. James MacPherson and Blythe Duff lead, with John Michie as Ross, Colin McCredie as Fraser and Robert Robertson as Dr Andrews. William Scott-Masson's Major Andrew Graham, Graham McTavish's Colonel Ian Sinclair, Ralph R. Thomson's Joe Brodie and John Kazek's John Scott fill out the ranks.

It is a busy opener that earns its length, and Ross is the big addition. The show gives him room to be complicated from day one. It is an opener that knows what it is for.