Halfway House

A young man is found shot dead in a public park, and the only clue on him is a library card from a city college. It's not much to build a murder enquiry on. But it points somewhere specific: a halfway house for recently released criminals, several of them known to the team by name.

Getting anywhere in that place is another matter. The hostel warden isn't keen to cooperate, and the residents have no reason to help the police find who shot one of their own. Burke, Ross and Reid are left to work through the wary silence of a building full of ex-cons, all of them with records, few of them with alibis worth the paper they're printed on. The investigation becomes a slow process of working out who knew the dead man and who wanted him gone, with the institutional resistance of the house itself sitting in the way at every turn. Few of the residents are inclined to speak, and those who do tend to remember very little.

Ian Madden directed, from a script by Glenn Chandler and Stuart Hepburn. The regulars are all here: Blythe Duff's Jackie Reid, Alex Norton's Burke, John Michie's Robbie Ross and Colin McCredie's Stuart Fraser, with Tamara Kennedy as Sheila Crombie and Molly Innes as Fiona Grant. Around them, Jake D'Arcy's Wisnae Me McGhee, Graham De Banzie as the pathologist, Billy McElhaney as George Henderson and Lorraine McIntosh as Brenda Johnstone fill out a cast that leans on familiar Scottish faces.

Halfway houses make for awkward television, because the villain is never clean: it's a building full of men the system has already failed once. The episode plays it straight, letting the wariness between police and residents do the work instead of manufacturing a tidy suspect list. The case gets its answer, but the place itself remains the more interesting problem, and the unease it generates lingers after the credits.