The rubric describes five unclued entries that give the theme to the puzzle and which indicate the “main object” to be found. It also mentions, in passing but rather ominously, “the grid’s final construction”, which suggests that a tricky transformation will be required after solving the clues.

So, what about trying to guess the theme of the puzzle from the title? “Rentokil” suggests pest removal, which suggests the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Perhaps rodents and children would have to be removed from the grid in some way? According to Brewer’s, the Pied Piper’s second appearance was on St John’s Day. And St John’s Day is December the … 27th. That’s tomorrow, not today. Is that close enough for the Listener crossword? I’m not sure it is.

(If only I were a regular Listener solver, or had thought to check the Listener Crossword website, I would have seen that this theme had already appeared in July 2009 — number 4041, “Motley Collection” by Merlin — and so was vanishingly unlikely to appear again so soon.)

Anyway, let’s solve some clues, which are all in the form of a definition and letter-mixture. Normally I find these very hard to get started on because of the large number of possibilities to consider. But today 40 across leaps out at me: “a holiday: now we can put our feet up” ⇒ FETE. The intersecting words fall quickly: “giving their anger against Christians” ⇒ IRE; “Eventually fed guests with sweet” ⇒ FUDGE; and in what seems like no time at all I have the bottom half of the grid.

My Pied Piper theory seems briefly promising as I solve “Donations go toward animal charities at Xmas” ⇒ WOODRAT. But it’s demolished when it becomes possible to guess that two of the unclued entries form the thematic phrase ON THE FEAST OF STEPHEN. And of course St Stephen’s Day is December the 26th. So is the theme Good King Wenceslas? Let’s not be too hasty, now, and consider other possibilities. I’m away from home and only have the Concise Brewer’s, which doesn’t have much. The name “Stephen” means “wreath” or “crown”. The British Parliament is sometimes known as “St Stephen’s” after the chapel at Westminster where it used to sit. None of this seems to fit. But Wikipedia’s entry on St Stephen’s Day comes to the rescue with a description of “hunting the wren”. In this Gaelic custom, “wrenboys” catch or kill a wren, and parade it around town on a pole, begging for money and singing a song beginning:

The wren, the wren,
The king of all birds,
On Stephen’s Day
Was caught in the furze

Let’s finish the grid and see if this is right. The top half is a bit harder than the bottom half, with a few words that need a visit to the dictionary. “Feast and sup: Yuletide carousal” ⇒ UPSY is new to me, as are SKEG (“I keel over when keg’s empty”) and ETHE (“oh, it hasn’t been easy since the early Christians decided on it”).

The remaining thematic entries are revealed to be TROGLODYTES (the genus of wrens, so named because of their habit of entering small crevices), and HUNTING THE BIRD. It seems to me that the latter ought to say “WREN” instead of “BIRD”. So “WREN” must be the “main object” that we’re hunting for. And the title “Rentokil” should be understood as “wren to kill”!

What about the “instructions given in the set of clues”? I am embarrassed to admit that it is not until this point, with the grid filled in and the theme discovered, that I notice that the initial letters of the clues spell out “FOLD GRID TO ORIGAMI BIRD SO ONE IS HEAD. SEE WING.” Oops. I had so many clever ideas for doing things with the superfluous words in the clues that I missed the simplest possibility of all.

So it’s out with the scissors and some origami instructions. Taking care that the “1” in the top left of the grid ends up at the head of the bird, I fold a rather dumpy-looking bird — more a plump moorhen than an elegant crane. But sure enough, under the right wing is the hidden WREN, formed from the W of WOODRAT, the R of DESSERT, and most suprisingly and delightfully, the rotated M of SMASHED and the rotated Z of ZION.

After looking at the size of the grid and the number of clues, my first reaction was that they’d lopped off half the clues at the printer’s! After reading the preamble, which stated that there were, indeed, only seventeen clues, it was obvious that they’d printed the wrong grid!

Except that, deep down, I knew this was very unlikely, so I just thought I’d tackle the clues and see what happened. I also thought that, with so few clues, trying to identify misprints before solving the clues might help. For example, clue 2 was probably “One with pieces scored …”, and clue 5 probably “Effect of four players …”. These plus another two were all that I could pencil in, but they might help later on.

After staring at the clues for about half an hour, I had two answers: HOY and SLOUCH. I had also counted the number of entries beginning in each quadrant and there were seventeen, so it looked as though each of the answers was to be entered four times … somehow. I found that this was a puzzle where frequent short visits helped a lot, and it seemed as though each visit yielded just one or two more answers.

I was pretty sure that the first clue was to the 17-letter entry, but it eluded me at every visit. ANOUROUS, CONODONT and UNNOTICING were next, and with .P..FEC. as the known misprints, they seemed to be spelling out PERFECT, and my guess was that the second word would be SYMMETRY.

Eventually, I had all but four of the clues, and my grid looked like this:

So, I thought, it might just be worth trying (finally) to fit my answers in somehow. By now I assumed that each answer was to be entered four times with each of the 90° rotations being used once. Fixing CONODONT and THIS reading down from the first row, led me to identify CHARACTER as part of 1ac; soon after, UNCHARACTERISTIC was slotted in, although the exact wordplay [CHARACTER + I in UNSTIC(K)] took a bit of work! There had been some other sneaky clues: “This many severe injuries …” with a misprinted r had to be read as “This, many revere, …” for ICON; and “Spirit with two additional heads I caught napping …” was ZING with two extra Zs at the front holding an I, namely ZIZZING. It didn’t help that I originally solved clue 2 as GILBERT [G for gram + anag LIBRET(TO)], although I hadn’t been very happy with it. It was only when I neared completion of the grid that I managed to resolve the problems this caused, and saw BERLIOZ [OZ after anag LIBRE(TTO)].

Finally the grid was finished, with some letters appearing as others in certain rotations of answers in the grid (eg C as U, and N as Z). It reminded me of another puzzle (I think it was a Listener) a few years back with a similar concept, but I couldn’t find out which it was. Can anyone help?

All in all, a great puzzle from Pilcrow; another setter whose future appearance I will treat with a mixture of interest and dread!

And only one more puzzle for 2009 … will I be all-correct, or will one or more entries have gone astray in the snow?