The Caring Game

A young woman found dead in her bath, a week gone by. That's the whole case in its opening image, and the initial enquiries don't get much further. Her workplace yields little. A week in the water means the body has done most of the talking already, and the rest has to come from people who barely knew her. Jackie Reid takes against her estate agent boss, which seems to be an occupational hazard of interviewing anyone in property. Fraser finds something more useful: the victim gave a good slice of her less-than-generous salary to charity, and the question is why that habit made her a target.

There's a sister she'd fallen out with and a neighbour who'd had enough of her. On top of that, the victim's actual lifestyle was being actively lied about, and unpicking those lies turns out to be the job.

Meanwhile Robbie Ross is having his own bad week. His estranged wife plans to emigrate to Canada and take their son with her, and he has to choose between the job he loves and the family he's losing. It's the kind of choice the show hands its detectives when the murder itself isn't enough.

Glenn Chandler and Michael Jenner wrote it, James Henry directed. Blythe Duff heads the ensemble as Reid, John Michie plays Ross, Alex Norton is Burke and Colin McCredie is Fraser. Andrea Hart is Gaby, Steven Duffy is Barry Carrick, Callum O'Neill is Dean Provan, Alex Donald is Eddie Wilson, Sandy McDade is Gillian McMartin and Alastair Galbraith is Allan Pitt.

The mystery is a proper whodunit with a body in a bath and secrets hidden under a respectable surface. But it's Ross's quiet domestic collapse that stays with you. The hardest cases, the episode suggests, are the ones being played out in family bedrooms while nobody's looking. That's the show at its best: a puzzle on the surface, a family falling apart underneath.