The Lost Verse

Pattern day brings Carraig Dubh's emigrants home, and its most famous son returns with them.

Tarlach Ó Dochartaigh is a celebrated fiddler, seventy-eight and frail, home to record the island's music before both it and he are gone. On the second morning he is found dead in the schoolhouse where the sessions were held. His failing heart makes the death easy to explain.

But Róise Gallagher notices that the room was rearranged after he died, and one old reel of tape has been deliberately unspooled and cut.

Tarlach's fame rests on a great tune recorded in the sixties, a tune he did not compose. He came home intending to put the true composer's name on record. Someone whose future depends on the value of Tarlach's catalogue cannot allow that confession to survive.

As Cathal Diver works to recover the damaged recording, an older island song reveals something else to Róise: two suppressed verses about a boat running dark, and a clue to the night her father died.