Wavelength

Robin Murray is a therapist who hosts a late-night radio phone-in, the kind of show where strangers ring in with their troubles after midnight. He comes home from it one night and finds his wife murdered.

It's a brutal opening, and it hands Jardine's team an uncomfortable job from the start. The man who found the body is also a professional listener, someone used to unpicking other people's secrets, and nobody in the room can tell how much of what he says is habit and how much is honest grief. The crime looks personal. It happened in the home, in the small hours, and the investigation keeps coming back to the marriage and to the people who circled around it. The victim's neighbours, the routine of the street, the small details of the night get gone over again and again.

The radio station gives the episode its mood: voices in the dark, strangers confessing to people they'll never meet. It suits a story about a marriage nobody quite saw.

Glenn Chandler and Mark Greig wrote it, and Danny Hiller 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. Robert Robertson plays Dr Stephen Andrews, Brian Cowan is DCS Brian Holmes and Yasmin Marley is WPC Heather McIntyre. Aden Gillett takes the central role of Robin Murray, with Jon Morrison as Davie McCann and Glenna Morrison as Lucy Richardson.

There's a particular chill to murder arriving in a place that's supposed to be safe, and the episode plays that card honestly. And there's something quietly unsettling about the way the team keeps finding that the most intimate details of a life are exactly the ones people hide from the people who know them best. The therapist who spends his nights listening ends up unable to hear what was going on in his own house.