The rat the size of a cat

The call came in on a wet Tuesday in November, and the woman on the other end of the phone was doing her level best not to cry. There was, she said, a rat in her kitchen the size of a cat. Not a large rat. A cat. She had seen it cross the floor at speed while she was making tea, and she had not set foot in the kitchen since.

Ian drove out that afternoon, past hedgerows dripping with the kind of persistent Warwickshire rain that never quite commits to being a proper downpour, turning the question over. Rats can certainly reach a respectable size — but cat-sized was, in thirty-odd years of this work, a first. He arrived expecting drama.

What he found, eventually, cornered behind the washing machine and considerably more frightened of him than he was of it, was a young rabbit. Not fully grown. Somewhat damp. It had, as far as anyone could work out, come in through a gap where a vent pipe met the wall, taken one look at the kitchen, and decided against going back out the way it came.

There is no dignified way to remove a rabbit from behind a washing machine while a client watches from the doorway, and Ian will be the first to admit there wasn't one that afternoon either. But the rabbit went back outside considerably faster than it came in, the gap by the vent pipe was measured up for a proper seal, and the two of them had a cup of the tea that had started the whole thing, once the kettle had gone cold and been put on again.

It is, by some distance, not the most impressive job in this company's history. But it is a fair reminder that the thing making the noise in your kitchen and the thing you are imagining making the noise in your kitchen are not always on speaking terms — and that a phone call costs nothing, whichever one it turns out to be.