The Rapture

Edward Muir and his son Luke are found brutally murdered, open bibles laid beside their bodies, a reference to the Rapture and the promise of eternal life. The bibles are the detail that turns a murder scene into a statement. They were members of the Triune Family, an austere religious group, and the scene reads as a message from inside the sect. Then Karen, the young daughter of Jackie's friend Eileen Mulray, is killed too, another bible by her body.

Karen's laptop shows she was dating Luke Muir, against his religion's rules. And the inquiry pushes deeper into the Triune Family's rigid world. The sect's rules reach into the world outside through its members, and the dead girl's laptop is where the walls come down. For Jackie, the case is personal twice over: her friend's daughter is one of the dead. Suspicion settles on the group leader's own household: his wife and younger son want to leave, as Luke did, and another son is standing in their way. A family that preaches unity is coming apart from within, and the team has to find where faith ends and murder begins.

Glenn Chandler and David Kane wrote it, Patrick Harkins directed. Alexander Morton is James Hardie, the group's leader, Fiona Bruce is Anne Hardie, Edward Corrie is August Hardie, Neil McNulty is Paul Hardie and Rachel Ogilvy is Eileen Mulray. Blythe Duff, John Michie, Alex Norton and Colin McCredie work the case, with Katrina Bryan as Ellis Sinclair.

Sects make for difficult territory in crime drama, and this episode handles it with more restraint than the subject usually gets. The horror here is the control, the way belief gets used to keep people in line and then to cover what's done to them. The sect's hold extends past its members' deaths, and that's the unsettling part the episode keeps coming back to. The bibles beside the bodies were always the tell.