Dead Man Walking

A mechanic found dead with no obvious reason attached is the kind of case that starts boring and ends sharp. The team work the community around him, and suspicion settles quickly on his business partner, Tony Benton, whose relationship with the dead man seems to have been all friction. The case looks close to done. Then it turns. Benton was never the killer. He was the intended victim, and the dead mechanic got in the way of a bullet meant for him. Cases like this live or die on the first few assumptions, and this one's first few are wrong.

That twist changes everything the team thought they knew, and the episode earns it by planting the misdirection honestly. What looks like guilt is proximity; the man everyone suspected was the one in danger all along. It is a neat reversal, played without fanfare, and it makes the earlier suspicion feel less like a cheat and more like real police work.

Glenn Chandler and Julie Dixon wrote it, Alan Macmillan directed. Alex Norton's Burke leads the usual team, with Blythe Duff's DS Jackie Reid, John Michie's DI Robbie Ross and Colin McCredie's DC Stuart Fraser. Paul Morrow is the wronged Tony Benton, Kate Donnelly his wife Karen, and the community around them includes Brian Pettifer's Arthur Magee, Tom Murphy as Jed Callaghan, Michael Glenn Murphy as Archie Callaghan and Ida Schuster as Auntie Betty.

The quieter episodes of Taggart are often its best, and this sits in that line: a murder with its wires crossed and a team that has to unpick it. The pleasure is in watching them work a case that was never what it first appeared. And there is something to like in a story that keeps its best trick for the middle rather than the end.