A Study in Murder

A college principal named Simon Nimmo is crushed to death in a lift shaft, and the mechanism has been tampered with, which rules out the word accident. Suspicion lands first on his wife, who had a reason in his adultery, and then on his daughter's boyfriend, before Robbie starts looking at the deputy principal, Laura Nimmo, who has the building experience to rig a lift and, it turns out, reasons of her own. The case becomes a question of who knew the machinery well enough to turn it into a murder weapon.

The second story is Stuart's, and it is the better one. After his adoptive mother dies, he tracks down his birth mother through the adoption agency, and the reunion is not the one he has been carrying around in his head. It is awkward and bruised, and over before either of them knows what to say. That grief follows him back to the case, and his confrontation with the killer at the lift carries more weight because of it. The two threads pull against each other nicely: the professional taking the strain while the personal bleeds underneath.

Glenn Chandler and Stuart Hepburn wrote it, Morag Fullarton directed. Colin McCredie's Fraser gets his best material in a long while, with John Michie's DI Ross, Blythe Duff's DS Jackie Reid and Alex Norton's DCI Matt Burke. Lindsey Campbell is Kirsty Nimmo, Hilary Lyon is Laura Nimmo, Katherine Connolly is Margaret Stuart, Frances Grey is Rhona Campbell, Robert Jezek is Dr Mujo Kovac, and Stuart Hepburn himself plays the unfortunate principal.

The lift is a properly nasty way to kill someone, and the show treats it as engineering rather than theatre. But the memory of the episode is Stuart's quiet, unhappy search for the woman who gave him up, which says more about him than any case file could. And it proves, once again, that Taggart is never better than when the murder and the man solving it are both hurting.