An Eye for an Eye

The murder of a doctor at a women's health centre looks, at first, like the work of the anti-abortion protesters who have been making themselves impossible to ignore. Militant fundamentalists are the prime suspects. But the deeper the team digs, the less the easy explanation holds. Drug links between the clinic and a local crime boss widen the enquiry, and DC Stuart Fraser keeps insisting the motive is more personal than either protest or trafficking.

Whether the demonstrators have been framed becomes the question at the centre of it all. Fraser's hunch gives the episode its spine: everyone wants the case to be about ideology, and the detective least convinced is the youngest man in the room. His reading of the case runs against the grain of the enquiry, and the episode is patient enough to trust it, letting him keep circling back to the same stubborn idea while the others chase the loudest suspects.

Glenn Chandler and Stuart Hepburn wrote it, Patrick Harkins directed. Blythe Duff's Jackie Reid, John Michie's Robbie Ross and Colin McCredie's Stuart Fraser do the legwork around Alex Norton's Burke. The doctors at the centre of the mystery are Lesley Harcourt as Dr Roberta Paton, Therese Bradley as Dr Pamela Gardener and Mark Bonnar as Dr Phillip Gardener, with Paul Cunningham as Billy Dunn and Vicki Mason as Audrey Edwards, and Tamara Kennedy's Sheila Crombie completing the roster.

The plot plants its suspects in plain sight, then quietly swaps the obvious motive for a more personal one. Mark Bonnar is worth a word here, long before Shetland made him a fixture of Saturday night telly. The drug connection keeps the story busy, but the heart of the episode is the question of who really wanted the doctor dead, and the loudest suspects, as ever, are the distraction.