When "A M", a Spanish lawyer in her forties, talks about the Franco death squads who murdered her grandfather and tossed his body in a roadside ditch where it remained hidden for the next 74 years, any hatred or anger at the perpetrators is either long gone or deeply buried. But a huge reservoir of sorrow remains, together with resentment at extreme bureaucratic insensitivity.

"In the records of the government office where he worked, he's still noted as 'absent from his work station for unknown reasons'," she says. "We want those records put straight, with recognition of what really happened."

She has requested anonymity for herself and her grandfather because "that's what my late father would have wanted". But, in any case, remaining nameless is all that is on offer to the vast majority of the 120,000-plus victims believed to have been killed and buried by Franco's militias – and who are still waiting to be dug up. That wait is coming dangerously close to becoming permanent....