Free Holloway Falls by Neil Cross Page B

illusion. It was a perceptual deceit. It was wired into hominid brains produced by random mutation, and it favoured survival on African savannahs an evolutionary instant ago. Those who characterized the pursuing cheetah as separate from its surroundings had a far better chance of escaping its teeth and going on to produce the maximum number of offspring.
    Solidity was an interpretation of reality. Every second, they were bombarded with invisible waves of information. They didn’t regard as miraculous the broadcast of complex data to distant radios, televisions or mobile telephones. Then why discount the possibility that such waves of information could be generated and received by biological machinery?
    Lenny’s eyes burned with zeal.
    Precognitive psychic experience made impeccable evolutionary sense. It had nothing to do with voodoo or spirit guides or whatever the fuck else. He urged Shepherd to think about it . What a superb adaptation it would be for a creature to detect its offspring’s distress when that animal was out of sight and earshot! What was supernatural about that? Couldn’t Shepherd see from a distance, and hear from a distance, and smell from a distance?
    The arrow of time was an illusion. Time present existed in time past, and time past in time present. Matter was mostly space. Every psychic experience Shepherd described had involved the extrasensory perception of human pain and fear and violence. Pain and fear and violence were the Darwinian crucible: that was where the senses were forged.
    The eye had evolved seven times in seven different evolutionary tributaries. Given enough time, something as awesome as the eye was biologically inevitable.
    Was what happened to Shepherd more miraculous than that?

8
    I
    Joanne Grayling had not been heard from since going on a date five days earlier. She always took the time to call home and her flatmates were worried. Joanne’s car, a black Volkswagen Golf cabriolet, was found later that day, double-parked and clamped near the Quadrant pub in Clifton. Her handbag was still in the glove compartment. It contained her purse, credit cards, mobile phone and housekeys. A small spray of blood was found on the dashboard.
    Had she been a street-corner prostitute, the police investigation might have quietly wound down when she wasn’t found after a few days. It was seldom easy to track the pattern of movement and stasis in a prostitute’s life, let alone her disappearance and death. Such murders were not easy to solve and there were questions of budget. Nobody cared much, even about butchered whores dumped by roadsides.
    But Joanne was attractive, Joanne was intelligent and Joanne was middle-class. She was easy for an ABC1 target audience to identify with and made for good copy. The Bristol Evening Post splashed the story on the front page. Where is our Joanne? Dolorous grandparents were pictured in the kitchen of their Cheltenham home, the grandfather clutching Joanne’s graduation photograph.
    The local television news made the missing girl their lead item the same evening. The next day, she made the nationals. No mention was made of how she was paying her way through university. She was just a brilliant, beautiful, missing graduate student.
    The Avon and Somerset Constabulary admitted they were ‘very concerned’ for Joanne’s wellbeing; Jim Ireland, the senior investigating officer, made a televised appeal for information relating to her disappearance. In the hope that a student might provide crucial information, an incident room was set up on the university campus. A dedicated hotline number was publicized on radio and television and in the newspapers. Student volunteers distributed leaflets bearing Joanne’s photograph, the hotline number and a plea for information.
    Many called the number—senior citizens who had seen a girl who looked like Joanne boarding a coach to Glasgow, a train to Wales, or shopping in Top Shop. A minicab driver remembered dropping her