I. The summer we found the skull was also the summer that Smith got stuck in the sluice gate and nearly drowned, and somehow those two events have been inextricably linked in my mind ever since. Looking back now, it is as if together they formed a threshold, a kind of boundary between the first
It was the autumn of 1996. The rust-crowned sycamores and horse chestnuts of Thornton-in-Craven were bathed in a thick morning mist. A light frost kissed the windowpanes of the old houses and bungalows, and the sheep of the surrounding farmland shuffled invisibly about the damp, sloping fields. Behind the woods to the north of the
