Island

A young man is murdered and mutilated on a Scottish tourist island, and the local vicar, who claims to know every soul on the place, tells the visiting officers the dead boy is a stranger to it. Ross and Reid make the trip over and find a community that does not welcome questions. The first theory is a ritual killing, which sounds right for the setting until it is not. The South American connection changes everything: the island is not a quiet retreat, it is a staging post for a drug racket.

Back in Glasgow, Burke and Fraser pull the threads and tie the victim to the smuggling operation. On the island, the bodies keep arriving. A fisherman goes missing and turns up dead, and a stranger turns up claiming to be a reporter at about the same time, with nobody able to say for sure who anyone really is. That is the puzzle at the heart of the episode: on an island this small, with this much money moving through it, the visiting officers cannot tell the decent people from the complicit ones.

Glenn Chandler and Robert Fraser wrote it, James Henry directed. John Michie's Ross and Blythe Duff's Reid carry the island thread, with Alex Norton's DCI Burke and Colin McCredie's DC Stuart Fraser working the Glasgow end. Robin Laing is Sergeant Sean Mackay, Kate Dickie is Wendy Nugent, Brian Ferguson is Callum Keane, Steven Struthers is Rees, Meg Fraser is Shona Johnstone and Matthew Zajac is the Reverend Campbell.

Taggart has sent its detectives to worse places than a Hebridean island, but rarely one this deceptive. The scenery is beautiful and the welcome is thin, and the show makes good use of both. The island keeps its secrets the way islands do, in plain sight. There is a real pleasure in watching the pair work out who is lying, which on this island is nearly everyone. And the ending keeps faith with that suspicion.