Taggart

- Season 25

(2009)

When student Elaine Donohoe goes missing, Clare Vorland, a professed psychic, comes forward to help the police, though Burke is cynical. She claims to have had a vision involving a white van and indeed one is traced, belonging to another girl on Elaine's hockey team, whose brother has a dodgy past. Still not wholly convinced that Clare is genuine, Burke attends one of her meetings where he is shocked to find her disclosing facts from past that she could not logically know. This makes it all the more disturbing when she predicts where Elaine's corpse may be found.

Robbie meets a one-night stand called Manda but she steals his book containing the names and details of his informants. One of them, Duffy, is found murdered with the word 'Grass' spray-painted next to him. When a second informant is shot dead, Robbie has to enlist Jackie's help to recover his book before there are any more deaths.

During a reconstruction of a knife crime for trainee police officers, one lecturer, Michael Shearer, accidentally kills another, Alistair Matheson. Matheson had beaten Shearer to promotion and he is certainly suspect, particularly after his daughter Katie attempts suicide and he attempts to get rid of her encoded diary. But then another witness comes forward that she saw a suspicious looking student loitering around Matheson's office before the demonstration. When it is revealed that the knife has been tampered with, it is clear that the charge is murder.

Robbie finds an abandoned baby on the doorstep of wealthy Jack Revie, who is lying murdered indoors. Jack was something of a philanderer and his wife Joan claims that she had been to see his mistress whilst a girl called Lisa turns up to say that the baby is hers, fathered by Jack. Jack's son Jamie seems to have been indoors at the time of the murder but he was stoned out of his head and his dodgy friend Davy is on the run, whilst half a million pounds has gone from Jack's account.This is a puzzler indeed for Burke and his team.

Three years earlier Jimmy Melville's corpse was found floating in a river. His mobile phone was sold on e-bay and at one time had been in the possession of Mark Joffe, a part-time English lecturer and crime writer, whose new novel 'Chaos' describes a murder identical to Melville's. He is an arrogant, evasive interviewee but he once had an affair with an Anne Scoular, to whom he was violent and threatening after she left him for Jimmy Melville.This gives Burke's team an opening, as does the cooperation of an older female colleague spurned by Joffe.