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By Root 265 0

his awareness so that he felt more secure, both in himself and in their hiding place. He could feel the crumbling brickwork of the fireback pressing into his spine, through his worn jacket, but he couldn’t tell where the rack was in front of him any more. When they’d first hidden themselves here he had been acutely aware of every millimetre around them, of the hideously loud scrape as the rack had been dragged into place. Louder, he was sure, than the sounds the searchers were making in the bar above. He’d been able to sense the weight of wood that barricaded them from view. The continued darkness had robbed him of his perception though, till he wondered if there was nothing but air in front of them. If they were exposed to anyone entering the cellar. He wanted to put on his glasses, so at least he would be sure he could see what was happening if they came.

When they came.

The crashing sounds above ceased.

* * *

The Doctor was using his full repertoire of arm gestures, enthusiastic tones and non-stop waffle in an attempt to restore the holiday mood: it wasn’t often they got to be tourists. Anji had started laughing after about five minutes. By tacit agreement, they had all avoided the German Pavilion. Although Fitz thought ‘pavilion’ wasn’t really the right term for a building at least two hundred feet high. He mooched along behind the other two, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. He just wasn’t in the mood any more. He thumbed the battered edges of the paperback in his pocket: Sartre’s The Age of Reason, the novel that had prompted this trip. An old postcard stuck up from the soft pages, reminding him that he was only a quarter of the way through. He didn’t really feel like finishing it though.

The Doctor led them around a corner, with a brief glance to check Fitz was still following. Now that’s more like it, Fitz thought, as he took in the building they were approaching. Plain square glass panels set in a metal framework, built to a comfortably human scale. He remembered some of the modernist buildings still standing in England in the 1960s: damp growth already encroaching on the greying walls and the paint flaking from the metal window frames. This must have been what these buildings had looked like new, before the British weather had beaten their optimism into decay. It was the first exhibition space that he felt even a vague desire to actually enter. Anji was nodding along, with that intent look on her face she got when she was determined to understand a new concept, as the Doctor expounded some point about lateral curves, so Fitz walked into the pavilion first.

The painting took up an entire wall opposite the entrance: no one entering the building could fail to notice it. Fitz was impressed by the scale of it, how the monochrome tones mimicked the white walls and slate-grey floor of the entrance lobby. He let his eyes wander across the giant canvas, roaming from the chaotic centre – where arms and animals and faces were jumbled into one another – to the edges where whole bodies were looking up to the heavens. The angles of all the elements drew his eye upwards to the blazing white eye that gazed down calmly over the carnage.

‘And, of course,’ the Doctor said from beside him, ‘Picasso’s Guernica. The centrepiece of the Spanish Republic’s pavilion.’

Anji frowned at the painting, her lips tightening into a thin line. ‘Shouldn’t it be more...?’

She trailed off. Fitz glanced between his companions’ puzzled faces and the canvas. There was something odd about it but he couldn’t place it. The image was familiar from reproductions. He remembered that the painting had done a tour of Europe when he was a small lad and a few of the parents of boys at school – some of the very few that had been willing to have the Kreiner boy round – had had cheap, fuzzy prints on their wall. Sometimes right next to a photo of one of his friends’ ever-absent older brothers or uncles. Though the prints had been tiny, he could remember finding them... something... something that he couldn’t quite recall... something that this