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Oliver Schick
I'm guessing 'that screeching thing' sounds like a baby being murdered?
If so, that's a vixen's scream, which means "I'm ready to copulate". It's designed to travel far and wide to the local dog foxes and is heard late winter/early spring.
We never hear it here in Hackney, but we have a local dog fox which has plaintively repeated his call of 'hup hup hup' (kind of like a bark, kinda not) for years. This can be either searching for a mate or a territory marking noise, but we suspect the former given that we've never heard a vixen's scream.