Fallen Angels

Three children and their father are found dead in a tenement flat, and it looks open and shut: Peter Ferguson, an unemployed man with depression, killed his children with drug overdoses and then hanged himself. The scene is tidy in the way a staged explanation often is. One of the four children, Callum, survives. But then pathologist Duncan Clark drops a problem into the middle of it: Ferguson died some time before the children did. The order of deaths is wrong, which means the story is too.

Louise Ferguson, the widow, has a past that starts to matter. She was once a baby-sitter for a child who died in her care, and the mother never forgave her. She'd been having an affair with a work colleague named Greg, and someone made sure Peter found out. Peter, meanwhile, was due to give evidence at a tribunal about his dismissal. Too many strands feed into the picture for it to stay simple, and none of them look good. Put it all together and the truth, when it arrives, is both simple and shocking, and it touches even the hard-nosed Burke.

Glenn Chandler and Lena Rae wrote it, Jean Stewart directed. Neve McIntosh plays Louise Ferguson with a stillness that does most of the work, Marc Ainslie is Callum Ferguson, Jordan McCurrach is PC Bridge, William Ruane is Fin, Sharita Scott is Bonnie, Peter Vollebregt is Dr Chris Mackay and Davood Ghadami is Duncan Clark. Blythe Duff, John Michie and Alex Norton anchor the inquiry.

Family tragedy cases can be grim viewing, and this one earns its gloom honestly. The pleasure here is the puzzle: an apparent murder-suicide that the timeline refuses to support. By the end the show has made you sit with the worst version of the story before letting the truth land, and it lands hard. There's no comfort in the ending, and the show doesn't reach for one.