The Girl with All the Gifts

40

The question hits Parks squarely between the eyes.

He was feeling pretty mellow up to this point. The brandy has soaked into him, dulling the pain from the many tiny shrapnel wounds he took in his legs and lower back when the stairs went to pieces. And here he thought the two of them were getting along, but no. The teacher’s got him clearly defined in her personal encyclopaedia. For Parks, Sergeant see bastard, bloodthirsty. He’s got a range of answers for this one, most of which would involve reminding her how she’s been able to stay off the hungries’ lunch menu for the last three years. Where her computer came from, and most of the other handy little gadgets that let her do her job. Why Beacon is still standing – if it is – for them to come home to.

But skip it. This isn’t going where he was hoping it would, and there’s nothing to be gained by telling this very attractive woman that she’s both a hypocrite and a whole lot stupider than he thought. It will only make the journey that bit harder.

So he writes it off and heads for the fire door. “I’ll leave you to enjoy the view,” he says over his shoulder.

“I mean, before the Breakdown,” Justineau says to his back. “It’s a straight question, Parks.”

Which makes him stop, and turn around again. “What the hell do you think I am?” he asks her.

“I don’t know what you are. Answer the question. Did you?”

He doesn’t need to think about the answer. He knows where his lines are. They’re not built to move, the way some people’s are.

“No. I’ve shot hungries as young as five or six. You don’t have much choice when they’re trying to eat you alive. But I never killed a kid who you could really say was still alive.”

“Well, I did.”

Now it’s her turn to turn away. She tells him the story without ever making eye contact with him, even though the rampart of a nearby chimney stack throws their faces into shadow and makes eye contact conditional in any case. In the confessional, you never see the priest’s face. But Parks is willing to bet that no priest ever had a face like his.

“I was driving home. After a party. I’d been drinking, but not that much. And I was tired. I was working on a paper, and I’d had a couple of weeks of early mornings and late nights, trying to bring it in. None of this matters. It’s just… you know, you try to make sense of it, afterwards. You look for reasons why it happened.”

The words come out of Helen Justineau in a flat monotone. Parks thinks of Gallagher’s written report, with its proceeding tos and its thereupons. But Justineau’s bowed head and the tightness of her grip on the parapet wall add their own commentary.

“I was driving along this road. In Hertfordshire, between South Mimms and Potters Bar. A few houses, every now and then, but mostly miles of hedges, then a pub, then some more hedges. I wasn’t expecting… I mean, it was late. Way after midnight. I didn’t think anyone at all would be out, still less…

“Someone ran into the road in front of me. He came through a gap in one of the hedges, I think. There wasn’t anywhere else he could have come from. He was just there, suddenly, and I hit the brakes but I was already right on top of him. It didn’t make a bit of difference. I must have been going over fifty when I hit him, and he just… he bounced off the car like a ball.

“I stopped, a long way up the road. A hundred yards or so. I got out, and came running back. I was hoping, obviously… but he was dead, no question. A boy. About eight or nine years old, maybe. I’d killed a child. Broken him in pieces, inside his skin, so his arms and legs didn’t even bend the right way.

“I think I stayed there a long time. I was shaking, and crying, and I couldn’t… I couldn’t get up. It felt like a long time. I wanted to run away, and I couldn’t even move.”

She looks at the sergeant, now, but the darkness hides her expression almost completely. Only the twisted line of her mouth shows. It reminds him, right then, of the line of his scar.

“But then I did,” she says. “I did move. I got up, and I drove away. Locked my car in the garage and went to bed. I even slept, Parks. Can you believe that?

“I never did make up my mind what to do about it. If I confessed, I’d most likely go to jail, and my career would be over. And it wouldn’t bring him back, so what would be the point? Of course, I knew damn well what the point was, and I picked up that phone about six or seven times in the next couple of days, but I never dialled. And then the world ended, so I didn’t have to. I got away with it. Got away clean.”

Parks waits a long while, until he’s absolutely certain that Justineau’s monologue is finished. The truth is, for most of the time he’s been trying to figure out what it is exactly that she’s trying to tell him. Maybe he was right the first time about where they were heading, and Justineau airing her ancient laundry is just a sort of palate-cleanser before they have sex. Probably not, but you never know. In any case, the countermove to a confession is an absolution, unless you think the sin is unforgivable. Parks doesn’t.

“It was an accident,” he tells her, pointing out the obvious. “And probably you would have ended up doing the right thing. You don’t strike me as the sort of person who just lets shit slide.” He means that, as far as it goes. One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flat-out hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down.

“Yeah, but you don’t get it,” Justineau says. “Why do you think I’m telling you all this?”

“I don’t know,” Parks admits. “Why are you telling me?”

Justineau steps away from the parapet wall and squares off against him – range, zero metres. It could be erotic, but somehow it’s not.

“I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is minus one. That’s my lifetime score, you understand me? And you… you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers… my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two.”

She says the last words right into his face. Sprays him with little flecks of spit. This close up, dark as it is, he can see her eyes. There’s something mad in them. Something deeply afraid, but it’s damn well not afraid of him.

She leaves him with the bottle. It’s not what he was hoping for, but it’s a pretty good consolation prize.