The Wages Of Sin

A family coming back from a funeral finds a taxi driver shot in the head outside a jeweller's shop. It's a bleak way to end any day. But the dead man's links to the underworld pull the investigation down a trail the episode is in no hurry to light up, and what looked like street violence starts to look like something more organised.

The further the team goes, the more the shooting resembles a single thread in a bigger tangle of old scores and professional criminality. Burke, Ross and Reid follow the connections from the jeweller's shop into territory where the locals are unhelpful and the answers come with strings attached. Every interview turns up another name, and every name comes with a reason to keep quiet. The enquiry takes them into the orbit of the people who really run things in this part of the city. The episode is less interested in who pulled the trigger than in the machine that puts people in front of guns.

James McIntyre, Julie White and Glenn Chandler wrote it, Alan Macmillan directed. The regulars are all present: 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. Tom Mannion plays Billy Houston, Aline Mowat is Carlotta Houston, Alastair Galbraith appears as Jonathan Harkins, Murray Ewan as Archie McGregor and Stuart Sinclair Blyth as Marc Houston.

The funeral-to-funeral opening is the kind of grim symmetry this show has always done well. What follows is familiar territory, but the episode holds up on atmosphere alone, and the slow tightening of the case around the city's criminal classes gives it a properly cold momentum. It's a story that rewards patience, and it trusts the audience to keep up with a trail that refuses to give up its shape quickly.