Lifeline

Derek McGrath is found dead in his car, engine still running. It reads as suicide, which makes it worse, because McGrath volunteered at Lifeline Central, a Samaritans-style helpline for people contemplating exactly that. A helpline volunteer dying by his own exhaust is a bitter kind of irony, and his wife is having none of it. Diane won't accept the verdict. Her husband, she insists, would never have taken his own life.

She's right to push. McGrath was having an affair with Rachel Brown, another counsellor at Lifeline, and the tidy story of a man who couldn't save himself starts to fray around that secret. The helpline's own staff are the ones lying, which gives the episode its sour centre. Meanwhile Jackie Reid has a problem of her own: someone has been using her credit card in her name. Her standing at the bank is in jeopardy. And the more she looks, the more her situation seems tied to the murder case, until the two inquiries keep tripping over each other.

Glenn Chandler and Robert Fraser wrote it, Ian Madden directed. Blythe Duff carries the double load as Reid, with John Michie as Robbie Ross, Alex Norton as Matt Burke and Colin McCredie as Stuart Fraser. Peter Forbes is Eric Rogan, Noreen Leighton is Diane McGrath, Fiona Bell is Rachel Brown, Beth Marshall is Clara Taylor, Paul Blair is Philip Taylor and David Ireland is Stephen Gower.

The show has always liked putting its detectives inside the crime rather than above it. Here Reid finds herself inside this one: the fraud is her own, and the murder inquiry keeps brushing against her finances. The personal and the professional blur until you can't tell whose case is whose. That blur is the point, and the episode manages it without ever straining. It's the quietest kind of horror, the sort that happens in ordinary rooms.