The man from the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) was not there, he said, to make idle threats. The meaning behind his comment on the death of Jill Phipps, however, was clear: "What happened to Jill has intensified our anger," he said. "Her death will not be in vain."
A tragedy, indeed. But a martyr was just the excuse the cause needed to redouble the violence and attract new militant blood to its ranks. The result of the anger sweeping through the animal welfare movement was evident even as the anonymous spokesman was saying his piece on Friday morning. In Plymouth, a policeman lay critically injured in hospital, having been struck on the head with a brick during a protest against calf exports the night before; he had been trying to help a protester who collapsed after a suspected heart attack.
In Warwickshire, the home of Christopher Barrett-Jolley, owner of Phoenix Aviation, the company flying calves out of Coventry airport (where Phipps was crushed beneath the wheels of a cattle truck) was besieged by 60 balaclava-clad hoodlums who rampaged through the grounds, terrifying his wife and smashing windows. The attackers were ALF sympathisers like Phipps and her death was being avenged in a way she would have approved. Her boyfriend, Justin Timson, 26, said: "She was all for violence against property. The incident at Barrett-Jolley's house was a spontaneous outburst of violence."
The death of Phipps, killed after she broke through a police cordon and flung herself at a lorry carrying calves for export, was bound to provoke mixed reactions. To ALF supporters she was a heroine, to the police a dangerous nuisance known, along with her mother, as a habitual protester, an agit-professional.
To the middle-class protesters waving their banners, Phipps and her ilk were a source of fascination, the sort of people they had previously seen only on television. This time, though, they were sharing the same barricades.
At every venue, including Baginton airport, scene of last week's tragedy, the professionals have been on hand to politicise the newcomers. Eddie Wassell, 57, a Coventry taxi driver who works by day and protests by night, was wary at first. "Looking at some of these people, I'd probably just go past them if they were looking to hire my taxi," he said. "But I've spoken to all of them and know they are committed to animal causes. I've learned a lot from them and I will take direct action like ripping down fences if it's necessary."
The drift from protest to civil disobedience to violence has been unstoppable. The veal campaign, admitted Compassion in World Farming (CWF), a moderate group, had been hijacked by a violent element a month ago. "I cannot believe that the people responsible for the violence can be people who care for animals," said Joyce D'Silva, the CWF director. But it was far too late to call it off.
The conundrum for the police and authorities is where genuine, legitimate protest ends and deliberate and potentially violent provocation begins. What were once fringe groups have learned to use middle-class indignation to camouflage their attacks on authority.
"Many of the protesters start with mainstream green issues, move on to hunt 'sabbing', then protecting trees from roadbuilding," said one expert on fringe political groups. "Eventually it all melds into a generalised fight against a capitalist-oppressive state, including the Tory government and the police. It means fighting anyone seen to be connected with it."
The latest tactic of shadowing middle-class protesters infuriates the police. In the aftermath of the violence in Plymouth, John Albon, assistant chief constable of Devon and Cornwall, accused the peaceful demonstrators of being as blameworthy as the violent ones because they provided them with cover. "The middle-class, elderly ladies, and people carrying children were sitting and lying down in the road. That behaviour is illegal and they are as much a part of the brick-throwing as anyone else," he insisted.
For the police at least, Phipps's death crystallised the divisions in the veal protest: it was time to choose whether you were part of the mob.
So was Phipps, as Sir Teddy Taylor MP said in the Commons, an "inspiration to all those who choose to pass on the other side", a naive young mother, or something altogether more calculating?
Perversely, the Phippses have always been the model of the ideal nuclear family. The children are the product of a long and stable marriage, the two brothers and two sisters remaining close to their parents even after they had grown up.
Jill, 31, was a much-loved daughter, described by her mother Nancy as being "like a light in the darkness". She was universally remembered as a conscientious mother to Luke, her nine-year-old son, a vegetarian soon to become a vegan.
In fact, the entire family would have remained happily anonymous had not Jill and Nancy's shared obsession been protesting and civil disobedience.
Nancy, wife of a retired postman, was the prime mover; she was attracted to the fledgling anti-fur campaign when her children were small, donated money to animal welfare charities and attended a demonstration in London against seal culling. Until then, she says, she had been "totally naive". She had not even heard of vivisection.
She took Jill, then 11, on her first protest at a fur farm and became hooked. Nancy joined the Coventry Animal Alliance, demonstrating against local foxhunts and farmers, occupying farms, and becoming area co-ordinator of the ALF support group, to help arrested activists with fines and legal expenses. She also became an expert in covert tactics, advising groups setting up raids on how to avoid detection.
The gamesmanship soon turned serious. For her part in a raid on a Unilever research station in 1984 in which computer equipment worth ú14,000 was smashed, the 59-year-old housewife was branded an "enemy of society" by the judge. She was sentenced to six months in jail while Jill was given a two-year suspended sentence because her son was just 13 months old.
The convictions attracted the attention of Special Branch, which has monitored their activities ever since.
Two years later Nancy was cleared on a judge's direction of providing a lab technician with a false reference to obtain a job at the London Medical College, which was raided by the ALF. Property worth more than ú2m was damaged and 20 years' research destroyed.
Through the 1980s Jill's militancy became more diffuse. She tried a conventional marriage to a post office worker, but it soon broke down. She moving to a hop farm in Kent where she met Timson, her boyfriend of five years, a member of the Anti-Nazi League. New causes were quickly embraced.
With her mother, she joined the amorphous fringe of "agit-professionals" some violent, some not who gather at every big demo. They set off on day trips in a battered white van: the poll tax riot, the Anti-Criminal Justice Bill demo, the M11 and Twyford Down demos were all key fixtures.
George Orwell well understood this phenomenon of zealots embracing a sequence of single issues: "Their belief that they are pure of soul is what makes them so pushy. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics, a creed from which you cannot draw any material advantage, surely that proves that you are right?"
When Jill Phipps genuinely embraced causes she was prepared to fight passionately for them, according to her friends. She would endorse violence against property but not against the person.
The police take a far cooler view. "Jill's name filtered down with regular monotony because of her involvement in anarchist activities," said one intelligence source.
She was a link in a network of dissidents whose activities are of growing concern to police. At the centre of this web is the ALF, an organisation which is emerging as the biggest threat to public order since the IRA stopped bombing Britain.
The ALF and its offshoot, the Justice Department, has been responsible for a series of letter and fire bombings targeted at firms and individuals associated with the meat or livestock trade.
The precise make-up of the ALF has recently been the subject of detailed scrutiny by detectives at the Animal Rights National Index, a small unit run by the Metropolitan police Special Branch, SO12. At the top of the organisation, say detectives, is a small nucleus which liaises with leaders of hundreds of cells.
"These people are committed soldiers," said one intelligence source. "An animal rights activist is probably as dedicated as the vast majority of Irish terrorists."
The problem for the police is not so much the five or six people who run the ALF's inner circles - their identities are well known because they have all faced criminal charges.
The difficulty is the sheer number of those, like Jill, who have openly supported the ALF at a local level and yet whose precise role is still something of an enigma. How far are they prepared to go in the name of animal rights? A break-in perhaps, but what about a bombing?
"There is a huge volume of people who are quite happy to help out," said one police source. "We are a nation of animal-lovers."
So how long will the fragile alliance of eco-warriors and middle-class protesters survive?
Those who move from demo to demo are not an easily identifiable group. Some, like Class War, or the Socialist Workers Party, have a fixed ideology and organisation, but most are individuals who drift from one cause to another. The ALF has a long-standing tradition of fostering anarchist links and many of those convicted of serious offences during the 1990 Trafalgar Square poll tax riots have ALF or hunt saboteur backgrounds.
Three days after Jill Phipps's death the battle line has moved from barricades to terrorism as a series of letter bombs were discovered in Yorkshire and Northamptonshire. One device sent to a livestock transporter was safely exploded by army disposal experts while a woman narrowly missed injury after a "greeting card" burst into flames.
