Point of Light

Andrew McHendry was the sort of private investigator whose cases don't usually end with his body at the bottom of a quarry. He had phoned Alex Sternwood to say he'd found Sternwood's wayward daughter Stella, who had disappeared from home. The quarry does the rest, giving the case a cold start that only warms up when Stella's name enters it. Not long after, her corpse turns up too, and the team are left to work out which came first: the finding or the killing.

The suspects arrange themselves with grim convenience. Stella was carrying the child of her brother-in-law, which gives him motive enough. But Eddie the stable boy had carried a torch for her, which gives him another kind. Neither man admits to much, and the team works the angles slowly. Jackie Reid has a case of her own on the side, sticking her neck out for McHendry's girlfriend, who is fighting for her rights to their baby son. It's a neat doubling: the dead man spent his last days chasing one missing woman while the woman he left behind worries she'll lose their child.

Written by Glenn Chandler and Paul Logue and directed by Patrick Harkins, the episode leans on Blythe Duff's Jackie Reid, John Michie's Robbie Ross, Alex Norton's Matt Burke and Colin McCredie's Stuart Fraser, with Fiona Gillies as Fiona Lang, Donald Sumpter as Alex Sternwood, Jamie Lee as Martin Lang, Julie Wilson Nimmo as Joanne Mars, Iain Robertson as Eddie and Louise Ludgate as Lyons.

The mystery is a solid one, but the pull is the grief underneath it. McHendry's search for Stella reads less like detection and more like someone looking for a person he couldn't stop thinking about. The show has always known that the best motives come from misplaced affection and broken families. Point of Light is that knowledge doing its work, and it doesn't need to shout about it.