“Not just yet, I don’t think.”
Mills nodded and glanced over at my desk. “Found anything?”
“An activist group,” I answered, turning the screen around so he could see it. “Very hell-bent against the gardens and their research. They’ve been protesting them for a few years.”
“What are those letters?” Mills asked, squinting across the room.
“Threats. The names of the addressee have been blanked, but I’m sure we can guess who they went to.”
“Can we track down who owns the site?” he asked, getting up from his desk and stretching.
“I’m sure Wasco can,” I answered, bending down to the computer and sending the website link over to Wasco. I hoped he could. It was much harder trying to investigate a faceless organisation into attacking a woman. A name would be very useful.
I emptied my mug and stretched my arms out, distracted from everything momentarily by a text from Liene, who sent me a picture of the view from her hotel window. I replied, slightly jealous, unable to keep a smile off my face. I put my phone back down, pointedly ignoring Mills’s questioning smirk and strode from the office, heading to the printer. Smith was there, making some photocopies, and she’d stacked my printouts on the table, looking up at me as I arrived.
“Are they yours, sir? Are you joining a group?” she teased.
“Very funny,” I told her. “Hardly my sort of group,” I remarked, looking at one of the posters with its blood-red text and blurry, grainy images.
“To each their own, sir, that’s what my gran used to say,” Smith said. “They look hardcore. Who are they?” Her face turned a bit more solemn as she looked down at the images with me.
“Activist groups that are pretty against our botanical gardens and its work.”
“Really? I thought people liked botanical gardens,” she said with a shrug. “Good for the environment and all that.”
“The gardens are fine; it’s the research being done there that people take a stand against.” Smith frowned and pulled one of the pictures closer to her.
“I recognise this one,” she said, tapping one of the posters. “I think I brought in a girl a few years back with a load of these in her bag.”
“Was she part of the group?” Mills asked, leaning over my shoulder. Smith chewed her lip and nodded.
“Must have been. Let me check.” She walked over to her desk, and we followed as she whacked the top of her computer with a sheepish grin. “Due for an upgrade,” she told us, sitting down and opening up her bizarrely organised folders.
“Yep, here. Call themselves the Nine Lives,” she told us over her shoulder.
I nodded. That was the one.
“Who did you bring in?” Mills asked her.
“A young woman, about my own age actually. For vandalising private property.” We waited a moment as she sifted through her meticulous note keeping to the copy of the report she had drawn up for Sharp. “Here she is. Lin Shui. She was twenty-three when I arrested her two years ago. Paid a fine, went home. Has a few more things on her record. All very similar stuff. Trespassing, property damage, the usual reasons activists get brought in.”
“Lin Shui,” I made a mental note of the name. “Brilliant, thank you, Smith.”
“Happy to help, sir.”
I straightened up and turned to look at Mills. “We’ve got a name.”
Seven
Thatcher
I wasn’t sure quite what we would be able to get from the young activist, other than a good sense of what exactly the research team and Abbie were up against in their day-to-day work. Lin Shui’s record was enough to make me want to track her down and speak to her but wasn’t enough to paint her out as a murderer or attempted one in this case. I thought back to what Mills, and I had discussed in the car on the way back from the gardens, of our assailant causing enough damage to hinder the research, to muss things up without really getting their hands dirty. But I also agreed with the point that Mills had made about the plants that were still in the greenhouse. If someone really wanted to see the lab suffer, getting rid of all their work seemed like the best course of action. It was all too underhanded, too private for me to see it purely as an act of activism.
“Found her,” Mills piped up, drawing from the thoughts that I had sunk into when we returned to our office. He picked up his laptop and carried it over to my desk, sliding it before me. It was Lin Shui’s Facebook page, her profile mostly containing links to videos, speeches or articles for her cause. Mills clicked on one of the most recent posts she had shared. Another poster, this one was calling people to an anti-hunting rally in the city centre. Mills scrolled down to the comments, where Lin and her friends discussed their plans for the event, and then he pointed at the date and the time. I glanced at the clock.
“Finishes in an hour,” I noted. “We’d better get a move on.”
It was good luck that we had such a chance of finding her without needing to track her down fully through the system. We grabbed our coats and left the station, walking rather than driving, along the roads to where the rally was being held.
We heard it before we saw it. Raised voices through megaphones, disgruntled mutterings of passers-by and loud, heated debates ringing out through the small square. A young man stood on a box with the megaphone, dressed up as a fox with fake blood spilling over his head and down his clothes. His fellow activists were similarly dressed, some with fake bullets wounds, some with nets wrapped around them, some with toy antlers on their heads. One man, dressed as a quintessential hunter, sat in an animal crate, his hands red, looking very miserable to be in there. A few others had joined in the rally from the
