But there is more to life than living in sewers. Chris Smith’s brilliant story ‘Since Charlie Hadn’t Come’ is a disturbing tale of bucolic extra-urban wildness sliding into unexpected degrees of horror. Along with this story, we are lucky also to be able to present the superb line-drawings of illustrator Jess Watson.

This month, too, we underline our commitment to bringing a little art to your journeys around and beyond the city with a few highlights from the celebrated Poems on the Underground series. We couldn’t resist a little punning with the inclusion of a gem by one of our favourite decadent poets… We hope you enjoy the issue.

Sophie Lewis
& Dena Ziari

The Guardian,
Monday 30th January,
2013

Holding his Kraven Crossfire M-26 taser rifle in one hand and his night vision goggles in the other, Eric Carr peers through the darkness into the garden behind the house in Brixton, south London. It’s the dead of night but Eric has a clear view through his night vision goggles, standing on the car bonnet to peer over the garden wall from the supermarket car park. Any fox that enters his line of sight is in for a shocking surprise.

Pursing his lips around a specially designed whistle, Eric lets out a high-pitched squeak. In the darkness of the garden something dashes through a flowerbed. The next instant Eric pulls the trigger of his rifle and his quarry – a two-year-old vixen – is dead.

“They think the squeak is a mouse,“ says Eric. “They can’t help but move, even if it’s just to go prone. That’s when I shoot them in the head.”

Welcome to London’s latest sport – the world of Urban Fox Hunting.

At the beginning of what is to be a very long night, I meet Eric outside the Knacker’s Yard pub in Soho, the starting point for this year’s UK Urban Fox Hunting Championship (UFHC). Originally founded by a small club of Urban Fox Hunters, the UK UFHC has grown alongside the urban fox population in London, where some experts estimate there are over 30,000 urban foxes. Sitting on all the bar stools and at several tables in the pub are this year’s participants; all male, mostly under thirty, mostly white, with deep working-class accents – accents from Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds, all cities with burgeoning Urban Fox Hunter clubs. Army fatigues or boiler suits are ubiquitous. Some wear kneepads.

Eric shakes my hand and offers to buy me drink. He has viciously spiked-up blonde hair, and he keeps scratching red blemishes on his face – fading spots.

He notices me looking at his scratching and says, “Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t”. I’m surprised to see his taser rifle strapped to his back, like a bow. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 prohibits the poisoning of foxes, and the Wildlife and Countryside Act 2011 prohibits the shooting of foxes using traditional firearms, but it is perfectly legal to use a taser as long as you possess the correct licence.

Despite the legality, the Urban Hunter’s use of taser rifles has become a contentious issue; three members of the public have been injured by Urban Hunters’ tasers, and last month a drunk hunter shocked and hospitalised a six-year-old girl who was wearing a Fantastic Mr Fox outfit. The negligent hunter has been jailed for three months, and the girl has made a full recovery.

Two hunters to our right are arguing the merits of M-26’s range considering it’s trade-off with stopping power – an argument that features their rifles being theatrically waved and pointed at each other. As the barmaid pours our beers, Eric can sense my unease and explains how his taser rifle works. He sticks out his index and middle finger to explain how the taser’s barbs pierce the fox’s skin.

“People who don’ know about this stuff think it’s the volts,” Eric says. “They see that a taser has a thousand volts or whatever and they think, “a thousand volts, that must be lethal!” That’s rubbish. It’s amps that kill you. Fifty milliamps across the heart will kill you. The tasers we use pull about two amps – they’re specially designed for foxes. Your average toaster, that pulls about five amps.”

So would it be more lethal to throw a toaster at a fox?
Eric just looks at me and says, “Well, no.”
Eric certainly knows his stuff; sipping his pint, he tells me about his South Bank University course, a GNVQ in Pest Control and Management. He is in his second year, working as a semi-professional (he is on an apprenticeship) pest controller during the weekends, taking part in competitions when he can. He hopes to gain a placement on a University exchange programme to California.

When I ask Eric why he enjoys Urban Fox Hunting he laughs and says, “The money mate, all the money!”

Eric explains how, after leaving school, he saw too many of his friends either take jobs in dead-end professions or turn to petty crime. A life flipping burgers or occasionally dealing class B drugs, Eric decided, was not for him. Eric explains that many homeowners – in areas like Mayfair, Notting Hill, Kensington – will pay extremely well to remove a pesky fox burrowed under expensive garden decking. Removed, Eric emphasises, by any means necessary. Many residents just want an end to the late-night mating calls, the ant-sized fleas passed on to beloved cats and prize-winning poodles, and the countless piles of excrement and half-eaten rodents found amongst the foxgloves.

Even competitions pay well. Kraven Tasers, the world’s leading provider of hunting tasers, sponsors the UK championships alongside all of London’s borough councils. The prize money stands at £5,000; as well as the money, the winner joins the UK hunting team at the World Hunting Championships in Seattle.

I ask about Eric’s confidence tonight and he replies, “Yeah, I’m feeling pretty confident. I think I can win.”

As we finish our beers, the competition’s organiser and London Urban Fox Hunting chairman, a Mr Thomas Swift, calls for attention. He makes several jokes about how to avoid shooting toddlers (“shooting four legs – good, two legs – bad”) and several too about the eco-protesters who have been sabotaging hunts (“If they’re on two legs, they’re wearing sandals, have lentil juice dribbling from their lips and are shouting about Mother Gaia, then you should set tasers to stun”). I manage to ask Mr Swift if I he thinks the UFHC could become a respected part of London culture. “We are slowly gaining more respect in the community,” Mr Swift explains. “People understand we need to keep the urban fox population down. We hunt because we enjoy it, and we have as much right to partake in the sport as our countryside brothers.”

Mr Swift informs the Urban Hunters that their mobile GPS’s are about to be updated with fox locations. Tonight is what is known as a ‘tagged hunt’: the hundred and twenty foxes for tonight’s hunt have been caught and fitted with tags that mark their locations on the GPS systems of the Urban Hunters’ phones, by means of a special software download. Tonight is not just a hunt; it is a race.

For a few seconds it seems like every eyeball in the pub is focused on a tiny glowing screen. Staring at the two-dimensional representation of London on Eric’s mobile phone screen, we wait for a series of tiny red dots to materialise. When they do, the entire pub explodes into action as army fatigues jostle against boiler suits, grabbing goggles, whistles, rifles and phones. Before I know what to do, Eric is leading me outside – the nearest fox is a few minutes’ jog away.

I can’t wait in the car, can I?
“The run will do you good mate!” Eric says.
As Eric and I begin to jog through Soho, pubs packed with theatre attendees blurring past us, I notice several other Urban Hunters jogging in the same direction. We speed up.

Eric reaches the entrance to the narrow alley running at a right angle to the road before I do. He drops to one kneepad, pulls the butt of his rifle up to his shoulder and fires. He holds the position, firing more and more volts into his target.

He looks pretty chuffed with himself as he turns and says, “Bingo!”
The first dead fox of the evening.
The fox has slumped to the ground on its right side, next to a skip. I suddenly have a new appreciation for the phrase “dead still“. If it weren’t for the tongue rolled out of the mouth, the fox would look stuffed. The eyes are still bright and intense, amber ringed with black, like mascara. The fur is a deep, vibrant orange like paprika. The head almost T-shaped with the long, thin muzzle and wild tufts of hair growing around the ears.

The fox could be the star of a wildlife documentary – if it were still alive.
Eric stoops over the fox to remove the black plastic tracking clip attached to its leg. He clicks a miniature switch using his thumbnail, turning off the signal, and he pockets the clip.
As we stroll back to his car, I ask Eric if he has any sympathy for the foxes.
“You should see one of them eating. I’ve seen them getting their muzzles right in there in a dead rat, really licking up the guts. And they aren’t all cute and cuddly – they can be right lanky, mangy things. They can get sarcoptic mange, fox tapeworm, toxocariasis, rabies…”
The fox I saw looked healthy. Eric’s litany of illnesses and diseases is most likely his advertising routine to potential customers, the kind of people staring at Eric’s rifle from the warmth of the crammed pubs and bars.
The fox I just saw looked pretty healthy, I say.
“Well…you could say that was a Megan Fox,” he says, and laughs at his own joke.
As we reach his car, a dull red Ka, which looks secondhand, I ask Eric how he would spend the competition’s prize money.
“Well, a new car definitely,” he says, wiping a clean streak in the filth on the car’s roof. “Nothing too flashy, just something so I don’t feel embarrassed when I get in it, you know. Probably help out with the family. Pitch in more. Help get my mum’s new kitchen built. Take the pressure off my brother. Stuff like that, I suppose.”
Take the pressure off his brother?
“Yeah, you could say he‘s the breadwinner, and he’s working full-time. On the mayor’s new pigeon project? He’s the real brains of the family.”
I assume Eric is talking about the mayor’s plan to phase out most of London’s organic pigeons and replace them with animatronics. According to Eric, there is a problem with the prototype model; instead of the quintessential backward and forward head bob, a software bug leaves the fake pigeons bobbing their heads from side to side like choreographed dancers.
“He’s shown me a video on his phone – it’s proper funny.”
Eric checks his phone and tells me the nearest fox is about five miles south, in Lambeth. The inside of Eric’s car looks like it’s been used as garbage site; there’s an empty Strongbow bottle under my feet, half a pack of doughnuts on the dashboard, a KFC bucket with rotting bones on the back seat, scraps of paper – notes, notebooks, receipts – everywhere, an MFI catalogue open on a page detailing the Princess Diana kitchen suite, and underneath a dirty t-shirt is a taser manual.
We find the next fox rummaging through an overturned rubbish bin down an alley behind an Indian restaurant. Eric doesn’t blink as he fires the taser’s barbs into the unsuspecting fox’s left side. A thousand volts run along the silk-thin lines to the barbs, and the manically shaking fox slams into a standing bin, which falls unto the fox’s back but is shaken off by the convulsions.
One more plastic tracking clip.
After this, Eric’s luck begins to run out. We head to Brixton, where four red dots are gathered in close proximity. By the time we park the car a street away from Max Roach Park, one dot has disappeared. Eric arrives at the park (which is more of construction site due to the laying of a new road through the park) just in time to witness a group of hooded teenagers use a rottweiler to corner and disappear another red dot underneath a JCB. The teenagers are part of a growing trend of bored young people hunting foxes with their savage-looking pets. “It’s fun, and we’re not hurting anyone, are we,” one of the teenagers explains when I ask him why he hunts foxes. Eric says he can’t find the tag and advices the red hoodie to take his rottweiler to a vet.

The two-year-old vixen, shot in the back of a garden, improves Eric’s spirits. Clambering over the garden wall, nearly falling into the garden’s neon carp pond and staying low despite the lack of light within the house, Eric retrieves his third plastic clip of the night.

The last fox in Brixton is several streets away, which calls for another jogging session. The fox is skulking around the back of a Burger King with a massive car park, overlooked by a giant videoboard advertising Plucky The Zombie Duck II: Revenge of the Brown Loaf. This should be an easy tag for Eric – the fox is at the edge of the car park, framed against the brick wall of Burger King, in a clear line of sight. As Eric drops to one knee, the situation changes. There is the sound of screeching tires and a revving engine and a black van rumbles into the car park. The fox freezes, staring at the van, just long enough for Eric to fire.

The van’s doors open and a woman dressed as a fox bounces out. Eric explains that they part of an activist group. They call themselves Friends of Reynard (named after the fox of European medieval folklore) and seek to disrupt countryside fox hunts, urban fox hunts and pest controllers. They go around during hunts “rescuing” as many foxes as they can. Their website features a cartoon character called Reynard the Rascal and a picture of a dead vixen in a gutter by a road, her cubs still trying to suckle. The Friends of Reynard website has little sympathy for anything but the foxes; “Would you kill a stray dog or cat because it upset your rubbish bins? When it comes to killing foxes, we don’t think there is any justifiable reason – be it for money, pleasure or convenience, it‘s all selfishness on the part of the human.”
“A big round of applause for our big man here! Well done, oh proud and mighty hunter!” the woman-fox says as she dances around Eric, who stays silent as he retrieves his fourth plastic clip. Several protesters – a nondescript group of young looking men and women – begin to applaud. I’m a little disappointed that none of them are wearing sandals.
“Not going to keep the body? A trophy for the wall? Not interested in the mess you’ve made?” the woman-fox asks before one of the activists tells her to get back in the van. As he gets into his car, Eric gives the van the V-sign, and the activists let out a burst of cheers, applauding in mock appreciation, and the wind carries a rude word across over to the car.

It is a long night. The hunt goes on until three am. Eric doesn’t shoot any more foxes; he is repeatedly unlucky as he travels from red dot to red dot – Lambeth again, Lewisham, Hyde Park – each one vanishing before he arrives. He stays silent, clearly tired – his driving becomes erratic and he yawns continually. Small talk – on his mum’s kitchen, on his plans for the future, on his lack of girlfriend – is attempted but our energy levels are running low. Eventually I fall asleep in the passenger seat. When I wake up, I find we have pulled up in a car park, Eric asleep in the driver’s seat. We drive to a pub and Eric offers to buy me a drink.

I order a coke as Eric calls his friend on the hunt to ask about tallies. One hunter collected ten clips. Another, sixteen. It sounds like the average score for the night was five clips.
I ask Eric why he remained silent when the activists confronted him.
“I know some people don’t agree with what I do. But I can’t help what I enjoy. I just want to be the best I can be at my job. In my experience, people will think whatever they want – I’ve been judged, I know what they think and, frankly, I’ve learnt not to care. The truth is, I‘ve never been good at confrontation.”
Eric goes outside for a cigarette while I sit down with my coke and yesterday’s newspaper found at the bar. Out of the window, as the sky begins to drizzle, I see Eric kick the rear wheel of his car.

Richard Lemmer is a freelance journalist in London. Recent work has appeared in NME and Adbusters magazine. He is currently News Editor for CtrlAltShift – www.ctrlaltshift.co.uk. He has interviewed The Killers, Maroon Five, Plane Stupid, Scouting for Girls, MP Alan Johnson, The Yes Men, The Prince of Jordan and Corrine Bailey Rae. He is working on a short story collection.

Here, the three people who, more than twenty years ago, dreamed up Poems on the Underground explain how it happened:

London’s Poems on the Underground started life as a light-hearted idea shared among three friends, lovers of poetry and lifelong users and advocates of public transport. How pleasant it would be, we thought, if poems could be scattered among the adverts in Underground carriages. Encouraged by far-sighted Tube managers, we put together our first selection of poems, and the project was launched at Aldwych station in January 1986.

The travelling public quickly took the project to heart. Within a short time poems had sprung up on Dublin’s coastal railway, the Paris Metro, New York’s vast network of subways and buses, and cities across Europe and beyond, from Moscow to Shanghai, Sydney to São Paolo. Over the past twenty years in Britain, indeed worldwide, there has been a vibrant revival in the art of poetry. We hope that our programme has played its part in this flourishing scene.

The lyric is surely one of the most perfect forms of poetry. By great good fortune, it is also ideal for display in Underground carriages, clear enough to be read easily by the traveller, brief enough, often, to commit to memory during an average Tube journey, and memorable enough to stay in the mind long after the journey is done.

…

It is strange to think that a project that began so casually is now part of urban history, the subject of academic theses and government surveys of ‘Great Art for Everyone’. We have tried to reach out to a mass public, but we’ve also offered poems which reflect their times and comment on them, not always in a way comfortable for officialdom. The theme of exile is recurrent, as are responses to war and peace, love and death, the nature and function of poetry. … London plays a central role, as home to Donne, Milton, Blake and Keats as well as émigrés and exiles. For London is the most international of cities, especially since the upheavals of the past fifty years, but also in its early days, when the Scottish poet William Dunbar praised London as ‘flower of cities all’.

Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik, Cicely Herbert

This time doth well dispense
With lovers’ long discourse;
Much speech hath some defence,
Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well;
Some measures comely tread;
Some knotted Riddles tell;
Some Poems smoothly read.
The Summer hath his joys,
And Winter his delights;
Though Love and all his pleasures are but toys,
They shorten tedious nights.

THOMAS CAMPION (1567–1620)
From Best Poems on the Underground (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009)

I drive the unmarked Transit van south to the office. The desks are cluttered with loose papers. I stretch out my short, freckly arms. These London roads: murder.
‘Afternoon Scotsman,’ Julian says. ‘How was church?’
‘Trapper.’
Julian shakes his head. ‘Will they never learn…’ He takes out a sheet, covered in old-fashioned, fountain-pen scrawl. ‘Businessman in Ealing who’s lost a grand’s worth of koi carp. Reckons foxy loxy’s been doing some fishing.’ Julian frowns his ruddy brow. ‘Golf course in Berkshire – digging up the greens again. Then a lady whose son’s pet tortoise has had a leg torn off.’ He holds out the sheet.
‘All fox-jobs?’
‘Afraid so.’ Julian smiles apologetically. ‘Cup of tea, Alec?’
Julian returns with two army-issue tin mugs, setting one down on a rare clear space in front of me. As he sinks into his own chair I see a familiar typed envelope on his desk.
‘Had another one?’ I ask.
‘Came in today.’ Julian unfolds the sheet and lifts it up. ‘HUNTERS GET HUNTED’, announces the lettering, looking as usual as though it’s been cut from a cheap, celebrity magazine. Normally Julian would have some dismissive jibe, but these latest threats seem to concern him. A badger-gasser in Reigate had his bungalow firebombed last month, meths squirted through the letterbox. Didn’t take enough precautions, Julian reckons.
‘Just bunnyhuggers,’ I say. ‘Environ-mentalists.’
‘Indeed,’ Julian replies. ‘Indeed.’

Vintage vulpine territory: pavement dustbins, suburban terraces, back-gardens with a row of allotments behind.
I ring the bell and see a shape form behind frosted glass. The first surprise is the lady’s age – late twenties, same as me. The next is that I’m looking down at her. London is the land of the tall.
‘Mrs Thompson?’
‘Yes?’
‘Alec McCluskey. Environmental Management Inc.’
‘Come on in.’
We pass the doorway to a sitting room. Glass ornaments, coffee-table heaped with cheap magazines. ‘How did you hear about us?’
‘Rentokil had your number.’
‘They don’t touch foxes these days. Too controversial.’
We enter a cork-tile kitchen, and Mrs Thompson opens the backdoor. ‘I found the tortoise out on the grass there. Happily munching away, just minus a hind leg.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Still at the vet.’
I follow her over the lawn towards a half-collapsed wooden fence. The allotments behind are sprouting with springtime vegetables. I look for signs of fox-spoor but see none.
I turn; Mrs Thompson has her arms crossed. ‘Trapped or killed, Mrs Thompson?’ I ask, glancing at the W-shape of her tight white T-shirt.
‘Killed,’ she replies, staring right at me. ‘And it’s Jane.’
A tingle fires in my groin. Haven’t felt that since Hazel’s days.

I sit cross-legged beneath a shaggy tent of yew. Twenty yards ahead is the trap. The moon is at three-quarters but there’s no reflection from the metal bars – I’ve gone for a black PVC-coated 42-inch Urban, bait-area crammed with gizzards, wire double-meshed to prevent external access.
Affixing my night-goggles, I stare out at the gravestone, green-tinged in the ultraviolet. There are jam-jars of flowers on the other graves, none on this. I read the inscription earlier while rigging the catch: Pawel Dankovic, fifty-four years’ old. Same age as my father.
A dog barks, a labrador: fox must be moving up a sidestreet, sending household pets into a frenzy. I part the yew fronds and see something up ahead, a twitch, the tip of a brush. A muzzle appears, then the rest of the body: a large dog fox, scrawny but mature. Sarcoptic mange in the thinning pelt: fatal if left to spread. The fox seems to stare at me, then lowers its head and slinks between two gravestones.
I let out a breath. The rest is a formality: a click as the catch is activated, a vain but valiant clank of body against wire. Taking off my night-goggles, I switch on the Maglite and swoosh from beneath the yew, tarpaulin and roofrack-cables under one arm. The fox shrinks into its cage, eyes like inkblots.

As I loop around the M25, dog fox inert in its darkened cage behind, I find myself thinking of Jane Thompson, then of Hazel, how she used to wait up for me until I came home. Textbook on table, Hazel would ask me to list the animals I’d dispatched that day. I would do it, too: nothing to hide, no laws broken. As I made the list, each animal would reappear in my head. Their heads would turn as they passed, eyes like spots of ink.

I turn off the A24 at Dorking and another car exits with me. I pull over with the hazard lights on. ABC, Julian likes to say, Always Be Checking. First thing, Scotsman, is they find out where you live – never drive from a job to home; always go via the office. The car overtakes with a low-geared diesel roar and I resume my journey.
I park up in the office yard. Once through the backdoor, I snap on the lights, twisting the dial of the incinerator, hearing that satisfying, boiler-like clank as the oil starts to burn. I open the chest-freezer: top bin-bag full of rats, frozen together like a black ball of string. The one beneath contains a dray’s worth of baby squirrels, tails like pink spaghetti, eyes still closed. Busy day for Julian; they aren’t even frozen yet.
I check the temperature: almost up to optimum. Fabulous model, the MB240: flue through the roof, triple-combustion chamber, broad opening-lid. I unlock the gun-cupboard and take out my .22.
The security-lights are still on – triggered by the wind, I presume, which is getting up now, shaking the pepper-pot horse-chestnut blooms that overhang the razor-wire. I glance round, uneasy for some reason, before screwing on the silencer and taking out the cage. A finger-snap of sound, then the shell chinks to the concrete, followed by the gentler slump of the fox.
Rich blood drips as I pick up the fox by the brush.

The two-storey, brick facade of the cottage offers its usual comfort. Julian knew the landlord from his army days; cut me such a deal Hazel practically begged to move in.
I enter crabwise, careful not to open the door too wide. Mikey is on his back, scrunching his terrier eyes as I tickle his pink belly. Teal, the black lab, has her nose to my trouser-leg – sometimes I think the scents I bring home are the real reason she cried so much when Hazel tried to take her away.
I edge into the kitchen, closing the dogs in the small hallway where their baskets are. Just yesterday’s London takeaway in the fridge; I shut it and put on the kettle. A pile of Environmental Science textbooks stares from the pinewood table.

The dogs bolt into the night. Tea-mug in hand, I stroll up the farmer’s track behind the cottage, breathing in the warm Surrey air: cow-parsley, cut grass, sap rising. In the distance, London glows like the Northern Lights, making me think of landscapes back home, those heart-catching views shared with my father when he first took me out to work on the hill. I wonder whether Jane Thompson would like this view.
Mikey shoots after a rabbit, Teal following on. I give a whistle then continue up the track, past the farmhouse, towards the road.
A car is parked outside the cottage. Headlights pierce the darkness; I pour out my tea and lurch forward. ‘Oi!’
The car screeches off on the wrong side of the road, before righting itself and disappearing. A red Vauxhall Astra, diesel by the sound of it. My face feels hot. HUNTERS GET HUNTED.

‘Came in this morning,’ Julian says, holding up a new sheet. ‘MURDERERS GET MURDERED’. Around the cut-out magazine letters are curlicues of red ink, a new addition. I rub my still-hot face. ‘Worth calling the old bill?’
‘No point. We both take precautions. Too cunning for ’em, eh?’
Julian’s face looks more florid than ever, nose striated with red, like a semiprecious stone. I fail to mention the car last night. Probably just a courting couple.
Julian passes me the morning’s call-list. Just a wasps’ nest in Clapham. ‘Leave the fox-jobs to me for a while, eh Scotsman? Getting near exam time again. Can’t have you doing this forever.’

Jane Thompson opens the door in a low-cut red top. As we walk up the corridor, I glance in again at the neat, toy-less sitting room. ‘Home alone?’
‘My son’s at a friend’s house.’
Jane holds open the backdoor and I squeeze by, smelling her floral perfume. I wonder if she’s going out later. Swinging a boot over the allotment fence, I set up my motion sensors, hanging two rancid chicken thighs up with gardening string. Back in the house, I perch on the doorstep, setting up my monitors and unzipping the .22.
‘What’s that on your wrist?’ Jane Thompson asks.
‘Wasp sting.’
‘Do you want some cream?’
‘You’re alright, thanks.’
Jane Thompson is still hovering. ‘How does… someone get into work like this?’
‘You looking for a job?’ I screw on the silencer. ‘I’m doing a degree course at Birkbeck. Just do this to pay the bills.’
‘When did you come down?’
‘Six years ago.’
‘Long course.’
‘Evening classes. Clash with the fox-work.’ I open my toolbox. ‘Just got to pop out to the van.’

No night-goggles in the van. I try to remember where I left them, then see a car parked up the road, a red Vauxhall Astra. I check the make – diesel – and stand there for a while, thinking.
The door is on the latch; I slip inside and shut it behind me. In the sitting room, I pick up a celebrity magazine. One of the pages has been torn out.
‘Alec?’
I march through to the kitchen: Jane Thompson is bending to the oven, putting in soup bowls. ‘I thought we might…’ Her smile fades.
‘You some mad bunnyhugger?’
‘What?’
‘Followed me home last night? Sending letters to the office?’
‘Sorry?’
‘There’s no tortoise here,’ I say, zipping up my rifle and gathering my kit. ‘No tortoise and no kid.’
I walk out, leaving her baffled protesting voice behind me.
*
No night-goggles in the office either… I rub my hot face, imagining it as lined and ruddy as Julian’s. Jane Thompson must have followed me to the churchyard, then the office, then home… The churchyard: of course: that was where I had the night-goggles.
The phone-light flashes red on my desk. I hit play. ‘Alec?’ I stop, recognising that voice. ‘I… didn’t know where else to call. My son’s with my ex, OK? We split up, and it… well it was my fault. My son’s coming to stay with me for the first time. He was worried about bringing his tortoise… a fox attacked it here once and I wanted to… reassure him.’ A pause. ‘I’ll still pay the fee. Goodbye.’
I continue to my van.

A wood-pigeon crackles off as I squeak open the churchyard gate. The moon is full; I pass by Pawel Dankovic’s grave and see fresh digging, a new fox in vacated territory.
Down on my knees I stretch beneath the yew tree. My hands find moist cold earth but no goggles. As I strain further, the images start to parade – foxes, badgers, bats, squirrels, all turning as they pass, eyes like ink.

A light is on in the church; I push open the high doors. Vestry to the left, cloak hanging by a sink; beyond, a figure hunched among the pews, collecting pamphlets.
‘Hello?’ I call.
The figure turns: dog collar, silver hair.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Thought you were someone else.’
The vicar straightens his spectacles. The stained-glass behind him is dark, but I make out an image of a man in a cassock, deer at his feet, dormouse in his palm, halo of songbirds around his head.
‘Evensong’s over.’
‘I’m the pest controller. Trapping foxes in the graveyard?’
The vicar peers above his stick.
‘Left some equipment outside. Anything handed in?’
‘Haven’t heard anything. Who booked you?’
‘Your colleague.’
The vicar frowns. ‘Afraid it’s just me here at St Francis’s. Was he a tall man?’
‘Aye.’
‘That’ll be our gardener then.’
‘But he had a dog collar.’
The vicar nods. ‘Bit of an odd fish, between you and me. Delusions of grandeur. Spends more time feeding the pigeons than mowing the grass.’
‘What car does he drive?’
‘Um…’
I’m already off down the aisle.

Speed-cameras snap like trapped beasts as I race up the A24 to Dorking. Turning a corner, I see curlicues of red in the distance, then speed up, shrieking the brakes to a halt, skidding on the tarmac. A fire engine is parked by my cottage, lights flashing silently.
I run out, leaving the driver’s door open. Two firemen in yellow helmets are coiling a hose into a rear compartment. One steps away. ‘Are you the owner?’
‘Tenant,’ I say, moving past him to the cottage. The front-door is off its hinges, propped against the brickwork, white paint blistered black. My nostrils twitch at the scent.
‘There was no one inside,’ the fireman is saying behind me. ‘Except…’
On the verge ahead I see two swollen pale bellies. Paws in the air, as though waiting to be tickled…
‘The blaze was controlled but… With all that smoke, they didn’t stand a chance.’ The fireman takes off his helmet. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Who called you?’ I murmur.
The fireman glances back at his colleague, who is readying a clipboard. ‘Local farmer heard the howling. Any idea how it might’ve started?’
I look back to the dogs. Their eyes flash red in the rhythmic, turning lights.

Thomas Mogford is 32, lives in London and is writing a crime novel about a lawyer with skin cancer who lives in Gibraltar.

Albert Reynolds. This is your farm. Don’t forget to close the door.

The words were faded and difficult to read.
Inside, Albert was sitting on a broken armchair. Tufts of white stuffing, like the hair from his ears, stuck out from the chair’s legs. He was wearing the rust-coloured dressing gown that Charlie had given him for Christmas. In the pocket of the dressing gown there was a list of things Albert needed to do before he went to bed: brush your teeth, go to the toilet, cross the calendar, blow out the candle, close the window. They were simple things, but they were important things.
Albert had a tumbler of whiskey in his hand, no ice; the freezer was broken, or he hadn’t paid his electricity bill, or he didn’t have a freezer. He didn’t know. His eyes were fixed on Martha, who was standing in his living room, scratching her head against the coffee table. Martha’s homeland bordered onto Albert’s cottage and was marked by an orange star dyed into her grey wool. Her itch seemed insatiable; it was hard to get at, somewhere between her ears, not quite reachable. She pushed the pile of Farmers Weeklys onto the floor. The latest issue was dated some weeks before, the same day as Charlie’s last visit. Martha bent down and tested the front cover with her tongue. Then she tried to chew through the whole paper. Albert mumbled at her, or tried to talk without remembering to open his mouth. She ignored him. Albert stamped his foot, making a pathetic clonk on the wooden floorboards. Martha turned away and carried the paper with her through the kitchen and out the door. She stood on her favourite spot on the grass by the wall.
Since Charlie hadn’t come, Albert had ignored a lot of things. He ignored the rats that scurried from the kitchen, past his feet-filled slippers into the hallway. Since Charlie hadn’t come, he’d ignored the cow’s carcase at the bottom of the stairs. The cow had been there for two weeks. She’d wandered in while Albert was asleep in his armchair and made her way up the steps. Then she’d chewed the guest room’s heavy velvet curtains, pulled them off their rail, and stood for a long time on the landing. Later she’d walked into Albert’s bedroom, looking for something else to eat. Seeing that there was no grass on the floor she’d made her way back to the stairs.
Now, the rats had scratched through her tough Friesian skin and eaten away at her flesh. Her neck was bent at an unlikely angle. Her eye sockets were filled with maggots. Above her body a calendar was Blu-tacked to the wall. A red marker hung next to it on a string. A carefully marked cross filled each day leading to Sunday, where it was written:

Albert Reynolds, get dressed for Charlie.

Since Charlie hadn’t come, the upstairs had become an aviary; bird shit covered the single bed, the worn carpet. Since Charlie hadn’t come, the cow continued to rot and Albert’s grey stubble became a white beard.
Charlie was Albert’s brother. He worked in a bookshop café in Windermere, selling flapjacks and tea for £1.50. Every Sunday he would visit Albert. He’d get a bus to Coniston and walk up the track beside the beck to the base of the Old Man, Coniston’s conical mountain. Albert’s door was never locked, but Charlie would knock and wait. He would hear Albert scurrying around the house, his Sunday shoes clattering on the wooden floorboards like clogs. When Albert opened the door he would have islands of stubble on his face and shaving foam in his hair. His white shirt would be inside out or have a charred circle where he’d tried ironing it with a hot saucepan.
Charlie would bring food; they’d have tea and go for walks. Last time Charlie came Albert had answered the door wearing only a dinner coat and shoes. He tried to boil the kettle without any water and then made tea without any teabags. Charlie patiently wrote him a note, with an arrow pointing to the right pot:

Albert Reynolds, here are the teabags.

After Charlie had helped him make the tea they went for a walk in the hills. Albert could still name all the sheep in the valley; it was one thing he never seemed to forget. There was a small waterfall that Albert always headed for; it had a deep pool in the shape of a basin. It was the only place Charlie could get Albert to wash.
Back at the house Charlie returned things to their right places. He replaced notes. He cleaned and tidied. Before he left he filled in next Sunday’s box:

Albert Reynolds, get dressed for Charlie. Don’t forget your shirt and trousers.

Since Charlie hadn’t come, the window in Albert’s bedroom hadn’t been closed. A damp semicircle on the side of the bed made the urine stains look fresh. But the bed hadn’t been slept in since Charlie hadn’t come. Since Charlie hadn’t come, every couple of days Albert would stand upright, and each time his body would be more withered, less human. He would prance into the kitchen and defecate in the sink.
Albert’s food supplies had either been eaten or had rotted since Charlie hadn’t come.
Albert looked at the door in the kitchen and saw that Martha had come back in. She walked over to the empty fireplace and stuck her nose in the cold, grey ash. She recoiled with a snort and sent a small puff of dust into the air. She ambled across the room and nibbled the corner of the rug beneath the coffee table. Albert picked up a shotgun that was leant against his chair and pointed it at Martha. He pulled the trigger; there was the gentle tap of metal on metal. He didn’t know where the bullets were. He looked down at the coffee table, which had a message scratched into it:

Albert Reynolds, your house supplies are kept in the basement.

Albert had to walk around the dead cow to get to the basement door. There was a sign pinned to it saying:

Albert Reynolds, put the torch on the nail. Did you switch off the taps?

A torch hung on a piece of string from a nail. Albert walked down the steep steps and stood on the basement floor. It was cold and black. He opened a wall cupboard and found a box of shotgun shells and a tub of grease. On the way back he paused to look at the cow at the bottom of the stairs. In the living room he took a shell from the box and threw it at Martha. She ran out of the house. There were now only three shells left in the box. He loaded two of them into his shotgun and put the last one in his mouth like a cigar. He shouted at the cow.
‘Where is Charlie?’ He paused for an answer. ‘If you don’t answer me or leave my house in the next five seconds I’m going to blow my feet off.’
He counted to four and fired; the recoil of the gun sent the bullet through a large window at the side of the house. The window shattered. For a second it hung like a spider’s web and then it fell in shards to the floor. Albert got up and walked back towards the cow, holding the shotgun in both hands and ramming the butt into his shoulder. The shotgun didn’t have a sight, but he looked down the length of the barrel anyway, walking towards her as he lined up his vision. He tripped over her hoof and landed on top of her, dropping the gun as he fell. It bounced down the basement stairs and landed on the floor below. Albert crawled to the door and looked down into the dark for a brief, silent moment before backing into the living room and scratching his head against the coffee table. Then he started chewing the papers on the floor. He stared for a long time at a picture of a sheep and then ate that too.
He crawled into the kitchen on his hands and knees and looked out the back door. A note, which he couldn’t see, was pinned to the back of the door. It read:

Albert Reynolds, you are not a sheep.

The view was still stunning, but cigar smoke clouds were forming on the horizon. It was going to be a wet evening. Albert went back inside, took the tub of grease from the coffee table, and smeared the dark, bile-coloured paste all over his head and his body He rubbed some into his hair. Then he crawled back though kitchen and into the yard, where the red chalk had faded since Charlie hadn’t come. By the edge of the wall Martha was chewing Albert’s favourite patch of grass.

‘Since Charlie Hadn’t Come’ is taken from Roads Ahead edited by Catherine O’Flynn. Roads Ahead is an anthology of 22 young writers and includes stories from Richard Milward, Chris Killen and Kathryn Simmonds. The book celebrates ten years of prize-winning independent publishing from Tindal Street Press and looks forward to the next ten. www.tindalstreet.co.uk.