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Then he heard the shouts from around him and saw Durruti, his comrade, the man he had sworn to protect, lying in the scrub convulsing. Clutching at his chest.

Buenaventura Durruti died of his wounds two days later in the converted Ritz Hotel in Madrid.

* * *

The drizzle had stopped, so they walked back up the hill in damp, squishy shoes. Anji still hugged her thin coat to her. She hadn’t expected it to be this damp or cold in Spain, which just went to prove she shouldn’t have bothered watching travel programmes.

‘I just think it’s asking for trouble, is all,’ she muttered to the Doctor’s coat-tails.

‘Anji, Fitz will be fine. He’s very capable at looking after himself, when he has to.’

You mean when you’ve left him behind somewhere, or been too caught up in whatever you’re doing to remember him, she thought. It wasn’t that she was overly worried for Fitz – he really did seem to manage to get by despite being his own worst enemy and he hadn’t been bothered by his solo mission – but the Doctor’s tactics seemed to border on idiotic. She’d not said anything as Fitz had slapped the Doctor’s arm cheerfully and headed off towards the people milling about by the burning dock. No sense getting him bothered about things. Besides he’d accepted the plan so readily she’d barely had time to get an argument together before he was handing her the umbrella and leaving.

‘So why couldn’t we all go?’ she asked, slightly breathless. Too many hills in one day, probably.

‘The sooner we gather all the evidence and find out what is going on, the sooner we can go back to our holiday,’ the Doctor told her, then looked back over his shoulder with a grin. ‘Besides, it’s far too close to the front line so it would be difficult for three people to get in and out easily, and, well...’ he trailed off, made a sudden show of rummaging in his pockets.

‘I’m a girl?’

‘That too.’

Oh, of course, that. Well, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to change her gender or her skin colour. Not a damn thing she wanted to, either. Everyone else would just have to deal with it. She’d felt the curious eyes on her in Paris, taking in her difference and almost wondering aloud what she was doing with the two apparent Englishmen. She’d grinned inside then, thinking that the gawpers would have been stunned to realise that the Doctor was the real alien. She thought she could feel someone watching her now as well. She was conscious of eyes on her, that strange feeling at the back of the head, like her scalp could actually sense someone’s stare. Glancing about she saw a few pedestrians walking down the hill, none of them noticing her. There were no figures standing in doorways, or alley mouths, and the street contained no cafés with crowds of people. There wasn’t even a twitching curtain. She shrugged it off. ‘So where are we going?’

‘I thought we’d start in Barcelona, see how the news of the bombing is reported.’

‘I thought Madrid was the Spanish capital?’

‘Usually, but it spends most of the war under siege and being bombarded itself. Barcelona is the least unsafe of the big cities.’

‘What about that other one, in the south west?’

‘Seville? It’s held by Franco’s forces. We can go there next.’

Anji frowned. ‘We seem to be planning some rather precise journeys. I mean, given that London still evades us.’

The Doctor didn’t reply, still busy rummaging in his pockets, pulling things out and staring at them. Clearly he hadn’t just been pretending to have lost his keys out of embarrassment. Or he was just dragging it out. He half pulled out an envelope and then glanced up at her. ‘I already gave you your papers, didn’t I?’

Anji tapped the breast of her coat, where the forgeries were safe in a pocket. She could feel the outer edge of the fake British passport. It was huge and hard compared to the slim flimsy red EU passport she still had somewhere in her room in the TARDIS. She was pretty sure she’d seen the word ‘Empire’ on it too. The past really was another country, she thought with a