Free More Than You Can Say by Paul Torday

you dressed like that? Are you getting married, or something?’
    I said the first thing that came into my head.
    ‘It’s a bet, Freddy. I’m doing it for a bet.’

Six
    Freddy roared with laughter. That was his answer whenever he was confronted with any situation that was less than straightforward. The appearance of someone in a tailcoat in the middle of a partridge drive definitely fell into that category.
    ‘Leader, I never know what you’re going to get up to next! We’ve finished shooting for the morning, so you’d better come back to the house with us and have a drink and a spot of lunch. Unless, of course, you are keeping your bride waiting at the church?’
    ‘No, no one’s waiting for me, Freddy, and I’d love a drink if there’s one going. I don’t want to crash your party, though.’
    ‘Not a bit, not a bit,’ said Freddy. ‘You’ll know everyone, I expect. Eck Chetwode Talbot will be there. You must know him, he was in the army like you.’
    Freddy turned about and I walked along beside him. I could see other guns converging on a row of Range Rovers and Land Cruisers parked by the side of a lane a few hundred yards away.
    ‘No, I don’t know him,’ I said. Freddy’s assumption that everyone who had ever been in the army must know everyone else was not untypical of people who had never served in it themselves.
    ‘Bertie Razen? Caspar Weingeld? Charlie Freemantle? Willy McLeod?’
    ‘Never heard of any of them, Freddy.’
    As a matter of fact I had been here before. I now realised why the landscape had looked familiar when I glimpsed it through the tinted windows of Mr Khan’s Range Rover. Freddy had asked me down to shoot a year ago, in November. It was pheasants on that occasion, not partridge, but I remembered the contours of the valley. We must be just around the corner from the country retreat I had been holed up in for most of the weekend. I wondered whether I could get Freddy to tell me anything about the house and its owner – he was bound to know something.
    I had first met Freddy across the card tables at the Diplomatic. On that occasion I had looked at his big, beaming face and listened to his conversation, which consisted mostly of expressions such as ‘Jolly good’ and ‘I say, what frightful cards you’ve given me’ and had jumped to the conclusion that he was both rich and thick. An hour or two later, when he had gutted and filleted me through a series of bluffs and double bluffs, in an extremely canny display of poker playing, I was forced to revise my opinion. Freddy was one of those people who, whatever their apparent lack of intellectual qualities, know how to hang on to their own money and how to prise it away from other people. In fact it was on the second occasion we played together that he took so much money from me he felt obliged to ask me shooting. ‘I tell you what, come and shoot a few pheasants with me down in Oxfordshire next Saturday,’ was how the invitation was phrased, ‘unless, of course, you have a better invitation?’
    I hadn’t, I thought. ‘Why not?’ That was how I got to know Freddy.
    Freddy put his dog in the back of his Range Rover, tossed the partridge to an older man who was bracing up the shot birds and hanging them in a game cart, and motioned to me to get in the front passenger seat. As I did so, another man climbed into the back of the car. Freddy introduced us.
    ‘This is Eck Chetwode Talbot. He and his wife Harriet have come down from Yorkshire for the shooting.’
    The new arrival leant forward to shake hands with me.
    ‘Richard Gaunt,’ I replied. ‘Will your wife be joining us?’
    ‘No, she’s gone to visit her mother, near Cirencester, for the day.’
    ‘We call Richard the Leader of the Pack,’ shouted Freddy as we drove away. Eck Chetwode Talbot raised his eyebrows.
    I shrugged and said, ‘It’s an unfortunate nickname that Freddy likes to use. It’s a long story.’
    It wasn’t far to the house and I remembered