For Their Sins

Drug dealers are being killed in Glasgow, one after another, and nobody in the community is queuing up to mourn. That's the cold starting position of this one. For Jardine and the team it's a case with an awkward shape: victims nobody will cry for, witnesses who'd rather say nothing, and a motive that could be anything from a turf war to a personal score being settled. A dead dealer is a loose end tied off for somebody, and the silence on the street is protecting the killer as much as it's protecting the neighbourhood.

The investigation works the way these things usually do, in small steps rather than flashes of brilliance. Movements get traced, conversations get weighed, and the forensic detail is checked more than once. The trail runs through half-empty flats and bolted doors, and every step the team takes forward seems to cost them two somewhere else. Robert Kinsella and John Kinsella hover around the edges of the inquiry, Ackie Boyle and Sadie Lapsley have their parts to play in the wider picture, and Rosie Lewis turns up with something that shifts the whole direction of the case.

The episode was written by Glenn Chandler and Danny McCahon, with Danny Hiller directing. James MacPherson is DCI Mike Jardine again, with Blythe Duff's DS Jackie Reid, John Michie's DI Robbie Ross and Colin McCredie's DC Stuart Fraser alongside him, and Robert Robertson's Dr Stephen Andrews on the pathology side. Tam Dean Burn plays Robert Kinsella, Sandy Welch is John Kinsella, and Jake D'Arcy, Judy Sweeney and Caroline Paterson fill out the supporting cast.

There's a particular kind of grim satisfaction in watching a murder team pick its way through a community that doesn't want them there. And there's something quietly honest about an episode that doesn't pretend the dead men were saints. The procedures do the work here, and that's very much the point. Nobody gets to be the hero, least of all the victims.