It was just the two of them now in the girls’ bedroom. Marta’s body had been found the day after she disappeared, a neat hole in her head that had gone in above one ear and come out below the opposite jaw. ‘Sniper’ was all Ivan had said, when he had come in with the news. He had seen a physical description that matched hers in the list that was published daily in the Gaceta newspaper, of the corpses collected off the streets. He and Paloma had followed it up, just to be certain, going to the Dirección General de Seguridad where photographs of the bodies were kept for relatives to check, hoping it was another twenty-one- year-old woman in a blue dress who had died of ‘organic disintegration of the brain’. They had come back with no doubts – it was her.

That was when everything had changed, the gears shifting up. Paloma had joined the Batallón Femenino del 5th Regimiento de Milicias Populares, the band of women fighting on the front line. Something in her had changed with the death of her friend as she had realized propaganda and night-time excursions weren’t enough any more; Modesto had been right – there was no time for ideological notions when bullets were being peppered from rooftops at women who had gone to buy tomatoes.

The government urged order and restraint but to Marina, it seemed they were more concerned with promoting their peaceable image to the international community than really eliminating the Nationalist rebellion. With the Assault Guard and Civil Guard defecting to the uprising and the loyalists that remained deployed to the front line, the citizens were sitting ducks: exposed, unprotected and vulnerable. The militias were stepping into the vacuum left by the disintegrating police forces but it was the checas, those political party and trade union squads set up to rout out the fascists in their midst, that had rapidly gained traction and power. Unchecked by any effective leadership or control from the Republican government, they were running wild and running the city.

Every day brought fresh arrests and executions of the pro-rebel supporters but far from feeling safer, Marina felt her inward terror grow – this was puppet justice, with just the mere suspicion of a right-leaning tendency being enough to condemn a man to death. Luciana had muttered one time, as they packed the bombs carefully as though they were stuffing chickens, that she had heard many of the denunciations simply sprang from sexual jealousy or attempts to evade debts. But in most other cases, it was enough simply to have owned a business or once opposed a strike, to have been a member of the clergy – or be their wife or daughter – or to have expressed support of the repression of the Asturian rising in 1934. If anyone was to discover then that she was a Mendoza of Ronda, a traitor by blood . . .