Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [62]
‘Eleana?’ He hadn’t gone away. He’d found a chair and dragged it over so he could sit at her elbow. ‘Tell me the details – it could be important.’
‘What, for Anji’s little project? Or for an amusing piece for New York?’
‘No. For you. Tell me, then you can forget it. You were shaking, Eleana, wild-eyed. I thought you were going to collapse. Just being followed through a parc won’t do that to a person.’
Not normally, no. This was Barcelona though. Eleana had noticed the routinely rotating figures sat in the window of the café opposite the door of the office. Always the same pairs of people, always arriving at the same time each day and hanging about over coffees for hours. La Batalla was being watched. Notes were being taken of who came and went. She was sure of it. She remembered Joaquín’s comment about the phones. All the information that buzzed about this building, the uses it could be put to. Being followed suggested they were preparing for something, stepping up the steady smear campaign against the anarchists. And it suggested that she was on the list of targets worth watching. She shrugged at Jueves.
‘I thought it was the Guardia de Asalto, come to make us disappear.’
‘Why?’
‘It was the uniforms mainly.’
‘You saw them clearly?’
‘Yes.’ Now go away. She could hear the teleprinter in the corner clatter into life, jerkily spilling out new information.
‘So why did you say you were being chased by a monster?’
‘I don’t think I did.’
‘Eleana, I was there. You were shaking and babbling about monsters.’
Something bore down on her again. All clutching hands and melting figures. Calling her name faintly. Moonlight on rifles. Aim.
‘I was confused. I meant that the Asaltos are monsters.’
Jueves was looking sceptical. He took off his wire frames for a second and polished them on his shirt sleeve. Without them his thin unshaven face looked a lot harder, older. Eleana felt as if he was looking at her mind, intruding into her thoughts. It was ridiculous. She turned back to flicking through the stack of work.
‘Assassís!’
García was standing by the teleprinter, waving a torn off message in his hands. The handful of staff were turning to look. As she spun in her seat, Eleana caught a glimpse of Jueves’s face. He has blanched, and she wondered briefly why.
‘It’s from Bilbao. “Guernica burning. Thousands civilians dead or injured. German planes raided for approx. four hours.”’
There was silence for a moment, or as close to silence as the room ever got. The printer continued to churn out more data. Then everyone was talking at once. García was reaching for the tattered map that served as their only reference material, already planning the headline and checking the location. Eleana turned back to Jueves. He had gone.
* * *
‘The problem is that although there are all these bizarre events, there’s no similarity, no concordance.’
They’d swapped places. The Doctor’s jacket lay on the bed next to him whilst Anji leant on her dresser, staring up at the map and tapping her chin with her pen. He looked half-asleep, relaxed. She still felt wired from earlier, jumping at the least noise in the street. She had been relieved when Jueves had gone off to get Eleana’s version of events, the Doctor having insisted on getting both accounts. The way he watched her, the way she could still remember the feel of his coat in her hands... it was embarrassing. She just wanted to concentrate on the work.
‘Which is why,’ the Doctor suggested, ‘you should tell me what you saw in the parc.’
Anji turned and leant against the furniture. She hitched