Compensation

The team leaves the city for the countryside of Fenmore after a farmer dies in a suspicious house fire. The fire has done its work, and what remains offers few clues. The villagers offer nothing at all. Nobody is prepared to talk, and the enquiry stalls before it really starts.

Burke feels it more than the others. But there's something about the closed faces and the quiet fields that gets under his skin, and he begins to sense they have walked into a private war, one fought between people who have known each other for generations and will not be moved by outsiders in suits. The villagers' silence is polite and total, which is somehow worse than outright hostility. The case bleeds into his personal life in ways the episode keeps half-concealed, and he carries the weight of it badly. There's a suggestion of something waiting for him back in Glasgow, though the show is in no hurry to spell it out.

Mike Cullen and Glenn Chandler wrote it, Alan Macmillan directed. The regulars are out in force: Blythe Duff's Jackie Reid, John Michie's Robbie Ross, Alex Norton's Burke and Colin McCredie's Stuart Fraser, with Lesley Harcourt's Gemma Kerr along for the ride. Matthew Bill Boyd is Billy Jameson, Dave Anderson plays Graeme Barr, Stewart Preston is John Duggan, Nick Farr appears as Mark Andrews and Joanne Bett as Laura.

Fenmore is the real antagonist here, and the show is wise enough to let the place do the threatening. The mystery moves slowly because the community refuses to be rushed. The slowness is the point, and it makes a deliberate change from the usual city pace. It's a quiet episode that asks the team to stand in a field and wait for the truth to come to them, which is not how any of them like to work.