Fearful Lightning

Karen Lennox is found dead in what looks like a lightning strike, the sort of freak accident Glasgow weather throws up now and then. It's written off quickly enough. Then another body turns up, and another, every one of them electrocuted, and the pattern starts pointing somewhere the weather has nothing to do with it. All the victims, it emerges, had some connection to Martin Strange, a local spiritualist with a following, who claims he can talk to the dead.

Jardine's team doesn't buy it, and you can hardly blame them. Mediums tend to be long on atmosphere and short on hard evidence, and a murder inquiry needs better than a séance. But Strange doesn't deal in vague murmurs from the great beyond. The messages he delivers are exact enough to make the scepticism feel like an expensive luxury, and the most startling of them claim to come from Jim Taggart himself. The murders keep piling up, and the team ends up racing an unknown killer while leaning, rather awkwardly, on the very man whose pronouncements they started out mocking.

Glenn Chandler and Steve Griffiths wrote it, Michael Brayshaw directed. James MacPherson leads as DCI Mike Jardine with Blythe Duff's DS Jackie Reid, John Michie's DI Robbie Ross and Colin McCredie's DC Stuart Fraser, with Robert Robertson's Dr Stephen Andrews in support. Larry Lamb and Diana Hardcastle play Martin and Mariah Strange, and Campbell Morrison, Alex Ferns and James Molloy fill out the guest list.

The show has always had a knack for taking an outlandish premise and keeping the policing in it believable. This is one of the dafter ones, and watching the balance hold is part of the fun. A dead detective solving cases from beyond the grave is a hard trick to sell, and the episode nearly gets away with it. The most frightening thing about Strange, in the end, isn't the ghost talk at all. It's how accurate he is when the team least wants him to be.