Crossing the Line

A museum is planned for Garsden, a former mining community on the edge of Glasgow, on the site of a pit that closed twenty-five years ago, just before the miners' strike. When the shaft is opened up, the workers find two skeletons: a man and a woman, in the same position they died in a quarter of a century earlier. Twenty-five years is a long time for a secret to stay buried, and the digging equipment does what gossip never could. A young married couple disappeared from the area twenty-four years before, supposedly to escape rent arrears. But the neighbours had long since stopped asking questions, and Jackie Reid, who grew up in Garsden, is angry at their silence. She's entitled to be.

Buried alive, or killed and hidden? Who were they? Those questions sit over the whole episode, and the answers take the team somewhere darker than a local scandal. More deaths follow before a secret stretching back to the miners' strike is finally exposed, and the old mine turns out to have been holding onto more than coal.

Glenn Chandler and Mike Cullen wrote it, Morag Fullarton directed. Blythe Duff leads as Reid, with John Michie as Robbie Ross, Alex Norton as Matt Burke and Colin McCredie as Stuart Fraser. Katrina Bryan is Ellis Sinclair, Maureen Carr is Theresa Davidson, Matt Costello and Ryan Fletcher are Kenny and Paul Davidson, and Finn Den Hertog and Stewart Porter are Mickey and Donnie Hood.

Cold cases have a special pull on this show, and this one carries the extra weight of a community that decided, years ago, to look the other way. The neighbours' silence says as much as any confession. Some secrets get built into the foundations of a place. That's what Garsden was sitting on, and the museum never got to open before the past came up through the floor.