WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME

Daniel slid down the wall of the aluminium lined lift, blood seeping through his fingers, staining his tee-shirt. It was his 16^th birthday today and his Mum had bought it for him. Mentally, he thought to himself, she’d kill him when she saw the blood stains all over it and momentarily wondered if they had any ‘Vanish’ in the cupboard under the sink. He smiled at the irony.

He’d been up to visit Mr Willerton, who lived on the 5^th floor of the tower block on the estate near where he lived and taken him his usual Friday night supper of fish and chips. That was one of the perks working in the chip shop – all the fish and chips he could eat. He knew Mr Willerton lived on a meagre pension and so gave him his Friday night portion which Mr Willerton appreciated. Mr Willerton appreciated Daniel and his many kindnesses. Sometimes, if he felt unwell, he’d ring Daniel and ask if he’d get his pension for him and may be a bit of tobacco and a few other bits and pieces. Daniel never refused any request for help – he was a very well liked boy about the neighbourhood.

And now, on his way back to the chip shop, he’d got into the lift and found two boys giggling at something. He tried to back out of the lift but the doors shut more quickly than usual and he had to stand there in agonising awkward silence while the two boys turned their attention to him and began taunting him.   

‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’ asked one.

‘That’s a nice tee-shirt,’ laughed the other and he started to stroke Daniel’s face menacingly with the blade of a knife.

Daniel tried not to flinch or show fear. He knew who these boys were and knew they were trouble. John and Peter Grogan were part of the infamous local gang which took cars and used them for robberies, before setting fire to them to get rid of the evidence. They followed old ladies to the post office on pension day and ran off with their handbags, leaving the old ladies reeling with shock and in some cases, in the throes of a heart attack brought on by the trauma of being robbed. Any bad thing on the estate that happened was usually down to these two boys and their gang – and they seemed proud of their status in the community.

They had heard all about Daniel and his ‘good works’ that he did for others. They dubbed him ‘Saint Daniel’ and laughed at him behind his back. He had never crossed their paths before preferring to keep himself well out of the way of trouble, but it came looking for him this night.

The two boys laughed maniacally as one drove the knife into Daniel’s stomach and twisted it round and round in excruciating torture in an unprovoked attack. As Daniel slid to the floor, with a look of absolute surprise on his face, the other boy unzipped his trousers and urinated on him. Both boys continued laughing as they got out of the lift at the 2^nd floor and ran down the rest of the flights of stairs.

When they reached the ground floor the lift had already arrived and they opened the doors. Daniel was already dead, the colour drained from his face and his eyes still wide open. Before running off, the boys hit the button for the 13^th floor and sent poor Daniel on his way again.

It was 9.00pm and there was a knock on the door. Daniel’s mother, Mary, answered the door to two policemen who took their caps off and asked if they could come inside for a moment. She took them into the front room of the flat she shared with Daniel’s father and younger brother, Matthew, and they noticed the table laden with birthday cake, and all the trappings of a party. There was an assembled group of people waiting for Daniel to come back from his stint at the chip shop.

The senior policeman cleared his throat and explained as gently as he could that Daniel had been fatally stabbed in one of the high rise flats over on the other side of the estate. It wasn’t known who’d carried out the murder but some witnesses reported seeing John and Peter Grogan running away from the building, laughing. The knife had been found in some nearby bushes and forensics were now conducting a thorough search of the lift and the knife to see if they could get any DNA matches with which to convict them.

Mary sank to her knees and the senior policeman rushed to help lower her onto the sofa.

‘But it’s his birthday today!’ she exclaimed as if the killers had picked the wrong day to carry out such a terrible deed. ‘He was only 16!’

Both policemen nodded with sympathy. Knife crime among the young had become a big thing in recent months and this wasn’t the first time they’d had to tell a mother of her son’s innocent death. In some cases, the victims were part of the gang culture, but in other cases, like Daniel, they weren’t and the crime seemed a senseless one.

‘I’m afraid to say this,’ the senior policeman said, sadly, ‘that Daniel was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.’   

The full extent of Daniel’s ‘saintliness’ came out at his funeral a couple of weeks later. The church was packed and people stood wherever they could find room. Daniel’s family looked around the sea of faces in surprise at the sheer number who’d come to pay their respects to their son.

The service began with a thin, watery rendition of the modern version of the 23^rd Psalm, The Lord is My Shepherd, but no one had the courage to sing the descant part. Space had been allocated during the service for people to come forward and say how much Daniel had influenced their lives. One by one a steady stream of people, young and old, went to the mic at the lectern and gave a brief anecdote of something that Daniel had done for them before returning to their seats, casting a sympathetic glance over to Daniel’s family.

Ms Brown who had a tri-coloured family had often asked Daniel to baby-sit for her while she clutched at her one evening out in a blue moon with some unsuitable suitor. Daniel would read to the children, help draw their mother a nice picture for when she returned, and he put them to bed. He would fall asleep on the sofa where he would stay until the morning before returning to his own home for a well-deserved breakfast.

Apart from Mr Willerton, who broke down in loud lusty sobs while recounting all the good things Daniel had ever done for him, several of the estate’s older population stood up and tottered to the lectern to tell of the little things Daniel did for them, whether it was picking up prescriptions, or taking them a surprise bunch of flowers to cheer them up on the anniversary of the death of a loved one. He seemed to have that wonderful knack of instinctively knowing what people needed.

‘Sounds like a bleedin’ Saviour or sommat,’ his mother opined under her breath to her husband.

‘Mary!’ her husband exclaimed, ‘these people genuinely LOVED our Daniel. They LOVED him, and by all accounts, he loved them. We should be proud of him. Why can’t you let him rest in peace as he deserves?’

‘Because I want him here with me,’ Mary sobbed, uncontrollably. ‘I loved him too but I was too wrapped up in the day-to-day chores to ever tell him. I always moaned at him because he was always out doing things for other people, and I was jealous because he didn’t seem to want to do anything for me. And now it’s too late for me to tell him. He died not knowing how special he was to me and how proud I was of him.’  

Daniel’s brother, Matthew, stood up and made his way down to the lectern. He thanked everyone for their wonderfully kind words about his brother and said how grateful he was that they had come to share what Daniel meant to them. He hoped that this tragedy wouldn’t stop people from caring about one another because to lose sight of that would be to negate everything that Daniel had begun.

There was an unexpected round of applause as Matthew returned to his parents, and sitting in the middle of them, he placed a hand in each of theirs. After the final hymn people filed out and the coffin was replaced in the hearse for its onward journey to the crematorium.

Among the wreaths was a single red rose with the poignant message which read: ‘Daniel, you will be always loved. You were in the wrong place, at the wrong time.’       

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