Homesick

Zbigniew Lisowski, a security guard at a building site, is shot dead. Hours later, hotel receptionist Kate Booth is found with strikingly similar gunshot wounds. Kate was also Polish, known to her friends as Kasia. Two victims in twenty-four hours, and the team has to consider a racially motivated killer. The first response is the natural one, and it's also the wrong one. Neither body tells the whole story, and the similarity of the wounds is where the case starts to come apart.

Anglo-Polish lawyer Paula Sobacz runs the Kaczynski social club, and when she appears on a local radio phone-in, a sinister caller claims the killings for himself and makes the racial motive explicit. It looks open and shut. But then the case turns: Kate and Zbigniew were cousins. The violence, it seems, came from somewhere far more personal than a stranger's hatred.

The investigation settles into the community around the victims, with Jackie Reid, Robbie Ross and Matt Burke doing the rounds and Ellis Sinclair doing the pathology on those matching wounds. Written by Glenn Chandler and Robert Fraser, directed by Patrick Harkins, the episode fields Emma Currie as Paula Sobacz, Gary Lewis as Donald Booth, Brian McCardie as Fisher, Radoslaw Kaim as Kristof Puliaski and Paul Luebke as Jamie, with the usual anchors, Blythe Duff, John Michie, Alex Norton and Colin McCredie, holding the centre.

The show keeps two theories in play long enough that you forget which one it started with. In the end the answer is messier than ideology, rooted in family and the resentments families carry. It's the kind of case where the caller on the radio was right about everything except the reason. The title is doing double work: the dead were a long way from home, and so were the feelings that got them killed.