The Book of Daniel

THE BOOK OF DANIEL

by

MAT RIDLEY

Copyright © 2015 Mat Ridley.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author.

ISBN 978-0-9930289-1-5

www.matridley.com

To Beatrix

For always having faith

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

- Inscription at the Imperial War Museum in London, attributed to Plato. No proof exists of him having said or written this.

“Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

- 1 Corinthians 13:7-8 (NIV)

PRE-MORTEM

Chapter 1

W
hen someone asks you to think of Heaven, what’s the first thing that comes into your mind? Blue skies, clouds, angels with harps? That sort of thing? I used to be a lot more down to earth than that. For me, Heaven could be summed up in just three words: life with Joanna. And Hell? That’s a little more open to personal interpretation, of course, but the basic idea is simple enough: the opposite of Heaven. Life without her.

Within the space of an hour, my life had gone from Heaven to Hell.

The way the evening began wasn’t anything special. Just like any other day from the last four years, I kissed Joanna goodbye, climbed into my old Ford, and headed off to work. Yeah, I know: it doesn’t sound like a particularly exciting life, four years of that, but I was quite happy with it that way. I’d already had all the excitement I needed in my army days, and was perfectly content with my place—our place—in the world. Maybe the problem was that I had become
too
content, complacent even, and perhaps higher powers had decided that this wasn’t good enough: we can’t have Dan being happy, can we? Apparently no, we couldn’t, and less than two hours later, there I was, speeding home as fast as I could, praying that I wasn’t going to be too late, all traces of contentment or complacency gone.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should tell you who I am first of all. My name is Daniel Stein, and I am (or rather, was, in a former life, so to speak) a night watchman at a small courier warehouse on the edge of London. This was a job about as thrilling as you’d imagine it to be—protecting large piles of brown boxes from danger—but mundane as it was, the work suited me just fine. I’m not really what you’d call a people person, so spending vast stretches of time with nothing but a few parcels for company was ideal. It wasn’t like there were a lot of other job opportunities open to someone with a face like mine anyway.

The evening that everything went wrong, I arrived at the warehouse at about half past eight, a little later than usual, but still early enough to spend a bit of time with my mate George, the afternoon guard, before my own shift started. George, unlike the work itself, was anything but mundane—rather, he was the very definition of ‘larger than life’. He had a waistline to match, too, carefully cultivated over the course of the fourteen years he’d spent babysitting our cardboard friends. We had become terrific friends—and rivals—from the moment I had started my job. He was an ex-Navy man, with at least one tattoo and at least ten stories for every port he had ever been to, and as soon as we found out about each other’s previous careers, the good-natured insults started to fly. George was a good friend, and the only thing on my mind that evening as I pulled into the car park was the anticipation of another round of verbal combat with him before he knocked off for the day.

None of the parking spaces near to the warehouse were free, because the delivery drivers had all parked as close to it as possible when they had finished doing their rounds. I didn’t blame them; it was bitterly cold outside, and I parked as near to the warehouse as I could myself. The building itself wasn’t much to look at—just a big plain tin box squatting in the middle of a big plain tarmac square—but even though it creaked like a rusty fishing vessel when the wind blew and the roof leaked when it rained, it was at least warm. Right on cue, the first fat spots of the rain that the evening forecast had predicted started to fall onto my windscreen, tapping away like a hesitant typist.

I got out of the car and jogged over to the warehouse. As usual, the door swung open without any need for me to use my keys, because, also as usual, George hadn’t got around to locking the place down. Years of quiet shifts had taught us that extreme paranoia was unnecessary when guarding the United Parcel Force warehouse, but perhaps we hadn’t been paying enough attention in class; maybe the real lesson we were being taught was “pride comes before a fall.” But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Certainly, as I stepped into the warehouse, there wasn’t any sense of impending disaster. Instead, it felt homely, comforting to be back in the warm again, even after such a short spell out in the cold. I gratefully closed the door on the outside world and made my way over to the security office. That was a laugh, calling it that; in reality, it was little more than a shed set up in the corner of the warehouse, barely tall enough for a man to stand up in. As I approached, I could see George nestled inside, his face unevenly lit by a portable television placed on the desk.

I ducked in through the door, straight into a wall of heat being thrown out by the small electric heater that George had turned up to full power. And yet, despite the infernal temperature, George was still wearing a long, sorry-looking blue and white scarf around his neck. I shook my head.

“Give it up, George. You’re never going to sweat off all that flab.”

“Hey, it’s the Handsome Prince! Welcome, Your Highness.” This said around a mouthful of some unnaturally coloured snack.

“Fuck off. What are you watching?”

“The match, of course. Man U versus Chelsea. Don’t you ever pay attention to what’s going on in the world outside your palace?”

“I try not to. Besides, you know how much I love football.”

“With barely a hint of sarcasm, either. I’m impressed. You’ve been practising.”

I walked over to the desk, contemplated grabbing a handful of whatever it was that George was eating, and thought better of it. “All quiet on the Western Front?”

“Yup, as usual.” George stretched and sighed. “Not that I’d care if someone was trying to rob the place at the moment anyway. Some things are more important.”

I wasn’t going to be baited. George could talk for hours about football. I tried to change the subject. “Looks like that rain they were talking about is starting.”

“It doesn’t matter, it’s only five more minutes now ’til the end of the match. Not that that’s going to give Chelsea much of a chance to catch up. Two-nil, I can’t fucking believe it.”

“I was more worried about that hole in the roof. I don’t particularly enjoy the idea of having to dry out a ton of boxes again, not after the shit we got into last time it rained.”

“Don’t worry, they’re safe. I’ve already put that big bin under the hole. Maybe one day they’ll even listen to us and fix the damned thing.”

“With all the years you spent fixing those leaky tubs you used to bob around in, I’m surprised they haven’t asked you to do it. Or maybe they were worried the roof couldn’t take your weight.”

“Fuck you,” George grinned. “It was probably one of your fucking army cowboys that built such a shoddy piece of shit in the first place.”

I conceded the joust to George, and left him to enjoy the closing moments of his precious match. “Back in a second,” I called over my shoulder as I stepped out of the office.

I always took a quick walk around the warehouse before starting my shift, just to make sure everything was in order. I’d been out of the Army long enough to not think of it as reconnaissance anymore, but subconsciously, I’m sure that’s what it was. It’s not that I didn’t trust George, but the habits of a lifetime of self-reliance are hard to break. The sounds of a football crowd squeezed into a shed were gradually replaced by the steady drumming of the rain on the roof as I made my way between the shelves and boxes.

It took me a couple of minutes to get all the way down to the back of the warehouse, and there were no surprises on the way. Why would there be? Nothing exciting ever happened in our warehouse. Well, there was the time the previous month when Jo and I had a champagne picnic in aisle 3G to celebrate our fifth anniversary (nothing but the best for Mrs Stein) and ended up making love, losing track of time until that stuffy old bastard Crockford came on for the morning shift, bringing a hurried end to the festivities. I grinned to myself as I remembered hopping my way to the front of the warehouse while I tried to pull my trousers back on, intercepting him and keeping him distracted while Jo covered up the evidence. It took a lot of sleight of mouth to convince Crockford there was nothing going on back there. And just when I thought I’d finally managed to throw him off the scent, Jo chose that exact instant to exit stage left, sliding quietly behind him and out of the door; but not before she took a moment to flash her bare backside in my direction, causing me to choke on a bubble of laughter and spend another ten minutes under the glare of Crockford’s spotlight. I remember us laughing so hard in the car on the way back home that I had to pull over twice to make sure we didn’t crash. But
generally
, nothing exciting ever happened in our warehouse.

That kind of incident was typical of mine and Jo’s relationship, though. Not the naked picnic, I mean, but the fact that she was so… alive. Considering she was a church girl, she was far from conventional, but that was one of the things I liked about her: the fact that she wasn’t afraid to pull the Church’s tail once in a while (or flash her backside at it), despite how incredibly important her faith was to her. And even though we didn’t quite see eye to eye on the whole issue of God, the Church, and the meaning of life, we still somehow managed to sail the seas of matrimony without running into any storms. Five happy years of marriage and Jo being five months pregnant were evidence enough of that. Like I said at the start: Heaven.

More than anything else, I loved the fact that I could just be myself around her. Although she was beautiful enough to make even a good-looking guy feel inadequate, I didn’t feel the slightest bit self-conscious when I looked into her eyes, because I knew that she loved me for me, the whole package, face and all. I was no fan of God anymore and I no longer cared what His plan for my life might be, but even so, I had learnt to appreciate the feeling of fate, destiny, or whatever it was that surrounded the fact that Jo and I were together. For all my scepticism, I just couldn’t think of any other way we could have ended up with each other. On the best days, I almost considered God and me to be even, despite all the shit He’d poured on my life up until then.

This day was not going to be one of those days.

The sound of voices coming from the front of the warehouse brought me out of my daydreams. I had almost reached the back of the building by then, and could already hear water trickling into the bin George had put in position. Between this and the rain battering on the roof, I couldn’t make out the exact words that were being said, but the fact that there were voices in the warehouse at all put me on edge. I began to jog back towards the security office, instinctively trying to keep as quiet as possible. It’s probably nothing, I thought, just someone who hadn’t checked UPF’s opening times properly and thought they could drop off a parcel on their way back from a late evening in the office. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened, but still, I thought it best to be careful; like I said, old habits die hard.

As I drew closer to the front of the warehouse, I could begin to make out a few of the words that were being exchanged, and that was when I knew something was wrong. Phrases like “break your fucking kneecaps” don’t tend to be used by tired office workers on the final part of their journey home, no matter how bad a day they’ve had. I began to use the boxes as cover, sneaking my way forward until I could gradually see what was happening.

George stood in the middle of a group of men, spinning around uneasily as he tried to keep his eye on all four of them at the same time. I could understand his concern; they were all well-built, and their body language made it clear enough that they knew how to handle themselves. Even discounting their intimidating appearance, the weapons that they carried—one a baseball bat, one a hockey stick, and two with guns—and the fact that their faces were all masked in black balaclavas, made it quite clear that they were not there with good intentions.

The guy farthest from me was quite a lot shorter than the others, but what he lacked in stature, he more than made up for in the energy with which he waved around his gun. It was easy to peg him as the leader. “Look, you fat fuck, just tell us where we can find it, and we’ll be on our merry way.”