Anyway, when I’d finished bagging and pricing the veg, Sarge handed me a stack of cardboard boxes and told me to go and collect the eggs from the cages. I don’t really like this job as those chickens can be vishous vicious. When I was a kid one of them pecked a hole in my sock and made my ankle bleed. Sarge used to go out and collect the eggs after that because I was too scared. But today he asked me to do it and I knew it was another test that I had to pass so I took the boxes, opened up the latch on the first cage and carefully stepped inside.

They made such a racket, those chickens, flapping their wings and shrieking. I tried to grab the eggs as quick as I could before I got pecked but that only made them go even more crazy. I just wanted to get out of there but I knew Sarge was watching from the back door so I took a deep breath and stepped across them. They all went running towards the back of the cage then, like a big ball of feathers, leaving the rest of the cage clear. One of the chickens was dead. It was lying at the front. Its legs and body were in the cage but its head had been pulled out of a gap in the wire and was all mangled. It didn’t scare me. Dead chickens are a regular part of life. I just knew that we needed those eggs to sell so I kicked the dead chicken aside and collected the rest.

When I’d finished I closed the cage and went over to tell Sarge what had happened. His reaction wasn’t what I was expecting. Instead of shrugging it off like he usually did, he got mad as anything and started raging about the ‘bloody foxes being the ruin of him’ and how he was going to set a trap that night for them. I thought of my friend the vixen with the eyes like the dead mother in the desert and I went cold. I don’t care about a dumb chicken or a rabbit or a dozy old sheep getting killed, but the vixen is different. If she died, I don’t know what I’d do. I didn’t tell Sarge any of this because I didn’t want him to think I was getting soft. But I started to put a plan together in my head.

Early evening we set up the produce out the front. Sarge says that’s the best time to do it as folk are on their way home from work and they’re hungry. But in the end the only custom we had was from the vicar. He pulled up in his shiny red car at about 7.30, just as I was about to put the stall away. Sarge must have seen him coming because he came out of the house and asked the vicar what he could get him. He bought a few bags of veg – carrots and potatoes – and a dozen eggs. I was watching him while Sarge bagged the stuff. He was an odd-looking fella. Very short with narrow shoulders and pale-blue eyes that looked like the glass china Sarge brought from the bungalow in Middlesbrough. They were cold eyes and looking at them made me feel cold too. He didn’t speak much, just muttered and handed over his cash. As he scurried back to his car, I realized what he reminded me of. With his cold eyes and his white collar he was the spit and double of a wood pigeon.