Page 74 of The Black Trilogy

Deep breaths. “And we’ve got seven? What’s the spare one gonna do? Have a three-way?”

“They can fight to the death in territorial disputes.”

Marvellous. A bloodbath for Christmas. “Will you put the phone down and help us look? Does anybody know where they went?”

Bradley held up his thumb, complete with a nasty red welt. “One of them pecked me.”

My husband gave Bradley a death stare. “Somebody get me a gun. We can have them for lunch.”

Bradley’s face turned the colour of the swan feathers stuck all over his sweater. “No bullet holes in the walls! I’ve just redecorated.”

Half an hour later, I’d rugby tackled the last bird in an upstairs hallway and gone to take a well-deserved shower. Five of the birds got relocated, and the last pair still lived on the lake out back.

Perhaps Christmas at Luke’s wouldn’t be so bad after all. I broke the news about us cooking to Tia, and she cheered up a bit.

“I’d better go to the supermarket, then,” I said.

While I lived at Hazelwood Farm, I’d got by with provisions from the local shop, but they didn’t have much of a selection.

“Can I come? I never get out much, and my ankle feels much better today.”

“Sure, why not?” That way, she could pick out her own ready-meal. “I’ll call a cab.”

“No need. Mother’s driver can take us. She’s hosting some boozy lunch at home today, so it’s not as if she’ll need him.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

I’d never had to do my own shopping—Toby decided what I should eat, and my housekeeper went out and bought it—so the whole experience was a novelty. And then somehow, on the drive into town, “we’ll just pick up a lasagne or something and maybe a trifle,” turned into “we might as well get a turkey and all the stuff that goes with it. I mean how hard can it be?”

The car park was packed, but the driver dropped us off right at the entrance to the store. Being rich did have some advantages.

“Call when you want to be picked up,” he said. “I’ll wait somewhere safer.”

Safer? Safer?

The meaning of his comment became clear when we found a trolley and headed inside.

Over the previous decade, I’d probably visited every war zone in the world. I’d swum with the Navy SEALs and done survival training in the jungles of Belize. I’d trekked through the Antarctic, and I’d completed the Marathon de Sables. But none of that compared with the horrors of Sainsbury’s the day before Christmas.

To say it was chaos was like saying World War II was a minor disagreement. We could barely move for people, and not two minutes after we got inside a catfight broke out over a packet of Brussels sprouts. Seriously. I mean, who even liked those? At home, we had our own tradition. Toby bought the nasty little suckers, and after lunch, my friends and I lined them up out back and used them for target practice. First person to shoot three from a hundred yards won an Easter egg.

But today, I had no gun and no bullets and also no clue what I was doing.

“We could start with the turkey?” Tia suggested. “We’ll need one of those for sure.”

“Okay, poultry. Aisle three.”

Except when we got there, we were greeted with a bewildering array of choice. Big turkeys, small turkeys, organic turkeys, RSPCA certified turkeys, turkey bits in packages.

I stared at the shelves. “Why are there so many different kinds?”

“I have no idea.”

“How about this one? The turkeys on the label look happy.”

And that seemed as good a reason as any to buy it.

“That’ll do. Who wants to eat an unhappy turkey?”

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