“Okay,” Caldera said. “Here’s how it is. I wasn’t around back when Richard was active, but from what I heard he had a lot of people running scared. Some of the Guardian types thought he had a plan, was working on something big with the Dark mages, I don’t know. Then all of a sudden, right when he was at the top of his game, he disappeared. Rumour was he’d gone somewhere, but he never showed up and neither did those two apprentices of his. After a few years the guys on the case filed all three of them as missing-presumed-dead and forgot about it.”

“Those two apprentices” had been Tobruk and Shireen. Deleo and I had been numbers three and four. “If they’d known Richard they wouldn’t have filed him as ‘presumed’ anything.”

“So where do you think he went?”

I shrugged.

“I thought diviners knew everything.”

“Richard disappeared in the summer ten years ago,” I said. Come to think of it, it was ten years almost to the day. It had been August then, and it was August now. “By the time he vanished . . . Well, let’s just say he and I weren’t on the best of terms.”

“You have to have some clue,” Caldera said. She was leaning forward, hands clasped, frank and persuasive. “Come on. You’re not seriously telling me you didn’t know anything.”

“You don’t know what Richard was like,” I said quietly. I held Caldera’s eyes, allowing a little of the memories to show through, letting her see I was telling the truth. “Those mages were right to be scared of him. You think he told me his plans? I lived in his mansion for two years, and by the end of it the biggest thing I’d learnt about him was how much I didn’t know. Anything you saw of him, it was because he wanted you to see it.”

“You’re a diviner, right? You never took a look to see?”

“That’s not how it works,” I said, and shook my head. “I’m sorry, Caldera. I don’t have what you’re looking for. I don’t know what Richard’s plans were. As far as I know, no one did.”

A silence fell over the table. Caldera drew back and I could tell she was disappointed. My phone chimed and I glanced at it. “I’d better go.”

Caldera held out a card. “If you think of anything or if anything happens, give me a call, okay?”

I hesitated, then slipped it into my pocket. “Thanks for the drink.”

* * *

“Who was that message from?” Luna asked once we were back out on the streets.