Abuse of Trust

Union activists Cam Beattie and Will Ramsey are shot as they come out of a meeting with their employers, Seaward Systems, over job losses. Ramsey dies. The shooting happens in broad daylight, which is its own message. A colleague says Will was about to disclose something big, and the Seaward boss tells Burke that Will was on the verge of accepting a deal. Corporate violence looks like the answer, and it would be a tidy one. It isn't.

Beattie discharges himself from hospital and is attacked again. The workers' clubhouse is torched, and union man Patrick Carr admits he set the fire but insists it was only to stop the deal going through, not to kill anyone. The case keeps pointing at the union and the firm, and the truth keeps pointing back at the house. Then Jackie interviews Beattie's wife and daughter, and the case moves somewhere entirely unexpected: dark family secrets involving incest, and motives that have nothing to do with the picket line.

Glenn Chandler, David Kane and Steve Lightfoot wrote it, Bill Anderson directed. Gordon Kennedy is Cam Beattie, Frank Gallagher is Patrick Carr, Joanna Roth is Lorna Beattie, Paul McCole is Francis Crellin, Gemma Stroyan is the reporter and Davood Ghadami is Duncan Clark. Blythe Duff does the digging as Reid, with John Michie, Alex Norton and Colin McCredie supporting.

The show likes a case that looks like one thing and turns out to be another, and this is a strong version of it. The industrial dispute is real. But it's a screen for something much older and uglier inside one family. The title is doing more work than it first appears: the trust that got abused was never just the workers' trust in their employers. By the end the factory floor looks almost clean compared with what was going on behind the front doors.