‘They came from Barcelona, the pigs,’ she spat, ‘running away like the dogs they are.’

Cal was used to such mixed metaphors from Florencia, but he was tempted to say you could not fault them for that, and the evidence was on that wall they had passed this very morning; the anarchists were likewise shooting the Falangists out of hand, and not just them, if they were rooted out in Barcelona.

Cal asked instead, ‘Do they know where they went?’

‘West, towards Lérida.’

Cal nodded and they went over to Vince. ‘It’ll be dark soon and I expect we will bivvy here for the night.’ He looked at the sky, now clouding over, with an even darker mass coming in from the east, promising rain; warm as it was, the boys would need to be under cover. ‘I’m going to talk to Juan Luis.’

‘Burial party, guv?’

Cal pulled a face, coupled with a sharp indrawn breath. ‘Best leave that to their own, Vince.’

‘They don’t seem in much of a hurry.’

‘We have sent for a priest from one of the villages we passed through,’ Florencia replied, in a manner that implied such an action was obvious. ‘The relatives have requested it.’

‘There must have been a priest here, girl,’ Vince growled, pointing to the church.

‘There was,’ she replied sadly, ‘but it was he who first identified those to be killed.’

‘It’s dirty this, Vince,’ Cal said, ‘and I would think it’s about to get dirtier.’

His friend looked at the bodies, now in a line and covered over, his voice sad. ‘Can’t see how.’

Cal tapped him on the back. ‘Get the lads settled and fed if you can. Florencia, has Juan Luis asked about the strength of the people who did this?’ She shrugged, which left the possibility that such a basic set of questions had not been posed. ‘We need to question the survivors about more than victims. How many men came here, how were they armed, and more important, if the local Civil Guard joined them, what are their numbers and weapon strength now?’

The information that came back to him, an hour later, pointed to a potential total strength of eighty men, the majority blueshirts in the kind of cars the middle-class youths who made up the bulk of the Falange would own – fast and open-topped – their weapons rifles and pistols. The Civil Guard was more worrying, being more a military than a police force. They had both trucks and he knew from Barcelona they possessed automatic weapons including light machine guns.

The real question for the column was simple. Where were they now?

‘Don’t like that hilly forest,’ Vince said, when Cal discussed it with him.

‘Nor do I.’

‘It is not necessary,’ Laporta insisted, waving a hand at a sun that, in dying, rendered black and even more menacing the east side of the hill Vince had alluded to. ‘The swine are cowards who have run away. They could be in Lérida by now.’

Upset by the suggestion they needed to protect themselves, Laporta had been even more dismissive of the notion of digging a foxhole by the side of the road west and manning it with the sole machine gun he possessed, while covering the other exits with rifles and sentries. Also, they had explosives, wire and the ability to make charges; they could cover the areas of dead ground with booby traps, and tripwires that would set them off and alert the defence.

That too was dismissed as unnecessary, with Cal’s impression of the man sinking as quickly as it had previously risen outside the telephone exchange; especially galling was the way he had obviously translated the concerns Cal expressed to those men who surrounded him, his senior lieutenants, seeking their approval for his negative responses, which was readily given. Never mind what was right and what was wrong; it was as if he needed to reassure himself he was popular.

‘And,’ Cal said, ‘they could be sitting up a tree watching us through binoculars. If you don’t put out guards they might come back.’

‘My men are tired,’ he snapped. ‘They will not be happy to stay up all night and they are far too weary to dig. Besides, it is not the Spanish way to fight from a hole in the ground.’

‘They will be a damned sight less happy if some of them die from a slit throat.’

Said with venom, it brought a predictable response. ‘I command here.’

‘Then I ask permission to do with my men what I deem prudent.’

That was greeted with an expressive shrug. The slow salute with which Cal responded was as much an insult as a mark of respect and was taken as the former, but by the time Laporta could react he was looking at the man’s back. It was only in walking away that Cal realised it was he who had been foolish, and it was far from pleasant to acknowledge the fact.

He had approached Laporta when men whose good opinion he craved surrounded him. As at the Capitanía Marítima, he took umbrage automatically at what looked like a challenge to his authority when in their presence. Laporta alone, as they had been outside the besieged Ritz, had seemed a different fellow, and Cal was sure he had come to seek his help. He promised himself never again to make any suggestions unless they were out of both view and earshot.

‘I’ve told the boys we will sleep in the church,’ Vince said, ‘though there are a couple with Irish parents who have refused.’

‘Give them a week and they’ll sleep on the altar and drink the communion wine,’ Cal snapped, still angry with himself. ‘But we are going to have to take turns with them guarding the roads in. Our Spanish friends don’t think we need to.’

Vince looked at the cloud-covered sky. ‘There will be no moon, and they won’t fancy being stuck out in the pitch dark, so young and all.’

The implication was obvious; night guard duty with no moon was bad enough for the experienced soldier – you heard and saw things that were not there, but knew not to just shout or shoot. These keen but inexperienced boys would likely be trigger-happy and blasting off at threats more imagined than real. Being out in the open was a task for either himself or Vince, and much as he disliked the idea, Cal knew he would have to go out on his own.

‘A gunshot will do the trick.’ Cal jerked his head towards a group of Spaniards sitting outside the taberna, Florencia laughing and joking with them. ‘Even this lot will wake up to that.’

‘And shoot anything that moves,’ Vince growled. ‘So don’t you go rushing about or you’ll be their target.’

‘What I wouldn’t give for a box of flares.’

He got the eye from those worker-fighters as he went to talk to Florencia, not friendly either, with quiet ribald comments and stifled laughter. It was, he suspected, no more than a demonstration of stupid male pride, the same kind of thing he had experienced before in too many locations. It seemed the hotter the country, the more the menfolk felt the need to look and act with bravado, and that was doubled by what they had achieved so far in fighting the army.

He wanted to say to them that a healthy dose of fear and a bucketload of caution would serve them better, but he lacked both the language and the desire. At least Florencia rose and smiled at him, moving to take his arm, which did nothing to soften the looks he was getting, jealousy now thrown into the mix as, heads close, he explained his concerns.

‘We don’t want to give these poor village people any more grief, so it would be better if they moved to the centre of the village where they will be safer.’

As the last of the light was fading, Cal Jardine was out on the western edge of the village, a full water canteen over his shoulder, looking at the ground, eyeing those places where lay the kind of dead spaces into which a crawling man could move unseen, as well as the walled-off areas of planted crops, vines, olive trees and vegetable plots, which would help to cover a discreet approach. He used the remaining light to pick out a line of approach to the village, one he would use himself to get close unseen, then he selected a spot from which he could cover it.