There is a new Agatha Christie adaptation on TV this Sunday. Starring Anjelica Huston and The Wire’s Clarke Peters, it looks just the kind of thing for those who like that kind of thing.

As promising as Towards Zero seems, I bet the big reveal at the end won’t be half as thrilling as the recent solving of another mystery, this one closer to home.

Who Killed Sauchiehall Street? draws upon a recent encounter between The Herald’s Kevin McKenna, a neighbour on these pages, and Susan Aitken, the leader of Glasgow City Council.

Talk between the two had turned to Sauchiehall Street, the famous Glasgow boulevard of broken paving, and who, or what, was to blame for the state it had been in for years.

The existing utilities were not going to be enough to support the new developments planned, she explained. “That was the main reason why that stretch of Sauchiehall Street had to be dug up.”

So far so reasonable, but there was more to come. Ms Aitken was about to unmask the real villains behind the biggest civic bourach since some eejit turned George Square red.

“Part of the reason why it’s taken longer than expected is that they found Victorian gas pipes that they simply didn’t know were there,” she said. “They didn’t appear on any of the old maps or plans. So, there had to then be a total remodelling of those plans to accommodate that discovery.”

So now we know: it was those dastardly Victorians and their pesky gas pipes wot done it. Why........

© Herald Scotland