Tony’s sitting comfortably. Not as in – completely relaxed; more like – at ease, mainly, with a sequence of events successfully initiated, now proceeding more-or-less as planned.
It reminds him of the lull between exam papers - ‘Finals’, back in the days before continuous assessment. Like as not you knew you’d done all right in the previous paper; now all you had to do was stay on track for the next one. A monkish existence with perhaps a couple of drinks at night to help you sleep. For those few weeks, you were chaste, pure, purposeful.
The way Gandhi must have been all the time; him and Nelson Mandela.
Enough tiresome reminiscence! Let’s get an update.
Dinky has taken the photos and his alter ego has sent them to Tony, complete with warning message from ‘osamaobama’. Didn’t he do well, thinks Tony, to identify the location in every shot? Canary Wharf, Canary Wharf, Canary Wharf, an icon in triplicate. Silly email address, but terrorists probably would have a warped sense of humour, wouldn’t they?
Soooooo...
A few minutes ago Tony duly forwarded the message and the photos to the command and control centre in New Scotland Yard, c/o the exclusive email address issued to senior 2012 executives and other London luminaries. A couple of minutes later, he phoned an even more exclusive number and asked for ‘Bessie’, as he had been instructed to do in the event of an emergency. When s/he came to the phone, ‘Bessie’
was duly impressed. Having closed the call only a few moments ago, Tony is now sitting comfortably, waiting for the pace of events to pick up.
One more thing. Though it wasn’t in the plan (at least, not in the version of the plan that Tony explained to Dinky), as he was forwarding the photos from ‘osamaobama’, Tony attached something else along with them.
Rude not to, really, when the email seemed to be crying out for further attachments.
The extra attachment was Tony’s photograph of Dinky standing at the back of the Thames Clipper, helpfully labeled ‘DinkyDutta.jpg’. In the covering note, Tony didn’t say anything to incriminate the youth. Was careful not to. He merely wrote that
‘there may have been something not quite right about this young man who recently came for interview in my office.’ Nothing in what he said that couldn’t be judged irrelevant when the proper police inquiry gets going. But Tony is guessing it might need an extra nudge to get it going properly. Like having a brown face to put things to, even if it later turns out to be quite the wrong face, sadly misplaced.
Even while he was setting him up, Tony also kept his word to Dinky. In between emailing Scotland Yard and his phone call to ‘Bessie’, Tony also sent the
‘osamaobama’ pictures back to Dinky, this time to the boy’s official email address. As Tony promised all along, Dinky could still be the one to break the story, though he might be more intimately involved in it than he was previously led to expect. But any misunderstanding will soon be cleared up, surely.
Thus for the time being we shall leave Tony as we found him. Sitting in his office, waiting for something big.