Even with this access to the news, he still worried. Sometimes stories didn’t make it into the on-line editions. Sometimes only an abbreviated version of the story was published electronically. And even if he was getting all that was available in the public domain, it didn’t mean that they weren’t looking for him. Only that they hadn’t made it public. They might be combing the country with his description. At the very least, they must know what car he was driving. He wondered if he should sell the Golf immediately, trade it in for another make and model. But if there was a search out for a black VW Golf with Hamburg plates, he would only be drawing attention to himself by getting rid of it.

He was in a dreadful state. He couldn’t sleep for more than half an hour at a time. Food stuck in his throat. The incident in Bremen had been petrifying, not least because he had never seriously considered the prospect of being caught. He had outsmarted those clever bastards with their degrees and diplomas, he had shown them he was master. He couldn’t believe he’d so nearly been snared.

He’d been so careful. Everything had been planned, right down to the last detail. After all, if his campaign were to be cut short, his message would be lost and it would all have been wasted. That stupid woman had almost destroyed everything because she hadn’t told her boyfriend to stay away. Stupid fucking bitch. Probably wanted to show off the fact that she could still get a man at her age. The cow had nearly ruined everything, and he had no idea whether he was in the clear or not.

In his good moments, he reassured himself that there was nothing the boyfriend could have told the police that would lead them to him. He was sure he hadn’t been seen, and there must be hundreds of thousands of black VW Golfs all over Germany, even supposing the boyfriend had remembered what kind of car had been sitting in the whore’s drive.

But in his bad moments, he lay on his bunk, his body secreting the rancid sweat of pure fear. It wasn’t prison he was afraid of. Nothing that could happen to him there could be worse than what had already happened to him.

What he was afraid of was the things failure would tell him about himself.