Bad Blood

A Kurdish minicab driver is stabbed to death, and the case lands with the team just as DS Hannah Fairchild arrives, an officer with real experience of racially motivated crime. Reid, Ross and Fraser take to her straight away. Burke doesn't. He reads her appointment as political correctness clattering into his investigation, and the fact that nobody is any closer to a motive for the killing does nothing for his mood.

The episode runs on that friction, and it's the better for it. Fairchild knows this ground; Burke wants a straight line of enquiry and keeps finding the route blocked by sensitivities he has no time for. He grows visibly annoyed as the investigation is steered around the delicate terrain of a race-hate case, and the working relationship curdles in full view of the squad room. Watching him throttle his temper while being professionally outmanoeuvred is a pleasure this era of the show delivers without breaking a sweat.

But there's a real case underneath the departmental spat. Establishing a motive for the stabbing stays stubbornly elusive, and the episode refuses to hand Burke the clean, obvious answer he's asking for. The two threads pull against each other: a team feeling its way carefully through difficult ground, and a senior officer who treats careful as a synonym for slow.

Glenn Chandler and Michael Jenner wrote it, Andy Goddard directed. Blythe Duff's Jackie Reid, John Michie's Robbie Ross and Colin McCredie's Stuart Fraser anchor the investigation, with Alex Norton's Burke doing the slow burn. Around them move Tamara Kennedy's Shelia Crombie, Pauline Knowles as DS Hannah Fairchild, Stephen McCole as Eddie Calder, Stuart Bowman as Frank Calder, Brian McCardie as Martin McLean and Bryan Larkin as Erwin Baxter.

It's a murder enquiry that keeps coming back to how the police argue among themselves, and the actual victim can start to feel like the least discussed person in the room. That's honest, and it holds up.