I recognised Lin Shui from her profile picture, though it was a bit hard to make out her face from beneath the fake mud and leaves that she donned. We walked towards where she had chained herself to the railing behind her, sidestepping the other activists as we walked. She spotted us coming and held out some leaflets.
“Interested in joining our cause, gents? Or are you in favour of spilling blood for sport?” She spoke the last part of her sentence in a raised voice, drawing the attention of the others.
“Are you Lin Shui?” I asked her, stepping closer so that I didn’t have to shout over the noise.
“I am,” she confirmed easily, eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Why?”
“I’m Detective Inspector Thatcher, North Yorkshire Police,” I told her, showing her my warrant card. “I wondered if we could have a word.”
Before Lin could answer, the girl beside her spotted my badge and shouted out.
“The police! Trying to shut us down for speaking the truth!”
“We’re not breaking the law,” Lin told me in the casual voice of one who’d been here many times before. “I’m very acquainted by Section 14 of the Public Order Act, I can assure you, Inspector.”
“You can’t arrest us!” the other girl shouted. “The police don’t care about us! We have the right to speak our truths!”
“I’m not here to shut you down,” I told Lin Shui in a louder voice so that the others could hear. “I understand that you’ve protested against Moorland Botanicals before. The research facility.”
She nodded. “Poisonous bastards. You’re here about them?”
“I am. I just wanted to ask a few questions about them, and then we’ll let you get back to this.” I nodded to the others, to the shouting girl who had gone quiet and was watching us with a sour expression on her face.
Lin straightened her spine, lifting her chin and looking me dead in the eye, even as a bit of leaf stuck in her black hair fell into her face. “Is it more important than the welfare, sanctity, and lives of innocent animals?” she asked in a raised, haughty voice, the crowd echoing her in a cheer that rang around us.
“A woman is in a coma in hospital, nearly dead,” I answered in a clipped voice. “I’ll let you be the judge of that.” I walked away back to Mills. I heard some murmured voices behind me and some shuffling and clinking, and then Lin jogged a few steps to walk beside me.
“This had better be quick,” she muttered. I walked her over to where Mills stood a few metres from her friends and waved an arm in his direction.
“This Detective Sergeant Mills.”
She nodded at him and folded her arms. “Who’s in a coma?” she asked bluntly.
“Abbie Whelan, she’s one of the researchers there,” I told her, hoping that the name would ring a few bells.
Lin scoffed. “One of them? She’s their prize girl, the golden goose. Almost all the studies from that place she’s had her hands on in some way or another.”
“You know of her then?” Mills asked. “Know of the type of work she does out there?”
Lin scratched her head, pushing her hair back from her face, her fingers clinking with the numerous rings she wore. “I may have protested some of her studies before. Politely, of course,” she added hastily. “All within the parameters of the law and everything.”
“And sent some threatening letters?” I asked, pulling out some of the printed images and passing them over. She barely spared them a glance, but she did blanch a bit at the sight of them.
“They’re just letters,” she said, adjusting her weight. “Words. To scare them a bit, make them think about what they’re doing. We’d never actually hurt anyone. That’s kind of our whole point.” She pointed to the scene behind her, the bleeding animals and caged hunter. “Stopping the hurt. For people and animals.”
“Well, Abbie Whelan got hurt,” I told her, my voice sterner, darker than usual. “Someone injected her with an unknown drug that almost killed her and landed her in the hospital.”
“And you think I had something to do with it?” she asked incredulously. “Of course, blame the activist. You sound just like my dad,” she added bitterly.
“We’re not blaming you for anything, Miss Shui. We’re trying to understand who would have wanted to hurt Miss Whelan, and yours is the only name we came across who might be able to explain the other side of things.”
“How did you find my name?” she asked, momentarily side-tracked.
“One of our constables remembered arresting you,” I told her. She smiled, a little proud of the fact and then drifted to the side so she could sit on a road bollard.
“We’ve been protesting them for a while now,” she told us. “Most of their studies are locked up tight, and nobody really knows what they get up to in there. There was this guy who got in touch with us a few years ago. He said he used to be cleaner there, said that they had all sorts of things going on that the public was never allowed to know about. Animal testing, bone marrow, stem cells, all of that.”
And here we thought they were humble gardeners.
“I can see why you’d want to bring that to a close,” I told her, and the defensive look on her face faded slowly.
“Abbie Whelan was one of the bigger fish we went after,” she went on. “Her name is tied to almost every project that comes out of that place.”
“We were made to believe that she was in charge of plants,” Mills told her with a frown on his face.
Lin looked at him, rather sorrily. “Well, she is the lead horticulturist, I suppose, but who told you that?”
“Her research partner,” I said.
Lin looked confused, her brows drawing together. “Research
