Almost every day something happened in the cell which made it difficult for Daniel to find peace, and his mood swung up and down. One day the door opened and the guard spoke in Arabic with Bashir and his friend. Afterwards, Bashir sank down on the rug, clearly affected by the conversation. Daniel went over and asked him what had happened.

‘We have to make a video,’ he began. Bashir talked about his possible death sentence. He and his friend would have to claim their allegiance to the Syrian regime in a video. They would have to say how they had helped in the bombing of civilians in Aleppo. The guard said that they would be killed if they didn’t cooperate in the propaganda video, which was intended to show that the kidnappers had imprisoned some of the regime’s supporters.

The video would lead to Bashir’s certain death, whatever he did. If other rebel groups saw it, they would kill him for supporting the regime. If he refused to appear in it, he would be shot by his captors.

Before Bashir left the cell, Daniel asked him for a favour. If Bashir were released, he was to write to Christina and Signe and say that Daniel was fine. They exchanged email addresses and Daniel repeated Bashir’s to himself over and over, so that he would remember it.

Bashir and his friend were taken away and Daniel never saw them again. He feared for them; he missed their company and felt lonely and far away from everything familiar. All his doubts resurfaced. Maybe he wasn’t on his way home after all.

Instead, the prison guards started to worry about his wrist. A doctor rubbed iodine on it and bandaged it and while Daniel stood with his hands against the wall, they exposed one of his buttocks and gave him a shot of antibiotics. They were clearly interested in keeping their hostage alive, but how long would they hold him?

Daniel was trying to walk away his worries, eighteen steps back and forth, when he suddenly got an unexpected visitor from Denmark.

The heavy metal door opened and he was ordered to put on his blindfold. He tied it as loosely around his head as possible.

‘Come with me,’ said the guard.

Daniel was made to stand against the wall in the corridor, where he could just make out the toes of four boots under the blindfold, standing right in front of him. Suddenly someone spoke Danish to him.

‘Where do you live in Denmark?’ asked a voice, which sounded young.

‘I live in Copenhagen,’ said Daniel.

‘Do you have any brothers and sisters?’ asked another voice that sounded just as young – from his accent, Daniel suspected the man had been born and raised in Copenhagen.

‘Yes, I have an older sister and a younger sister.’

The Danes seemed to be carefree and in high spirits; they were chuckling and Daniel was irritated by the thought that they had come just to see the Danish zoo animal in the basement.

‘Do you think we can get two million euros for you?’ asked one.

‘The Danish government doesn’t negotiate,’ said Daniel, and he told them that his father was a lorry driver and his mother a hairdresser. Two million euros was a massive sum for them.

‘I really don’t think you can get that much,’ added Daniel.

‘Is there any information you can give us about your family?’ demanded the other one.

Daniel gave them the information that he could remember; telephone numbers for Susanne and Kjeld and email addresses for his sister and Signe. He tried to make sense of the fact that there were two Danish-speaking boys in an Islamist prison in Syria, quizzing a kidnapped compatriot.

‘What about your elder sister?’ asked one of them. ‘How old is she?’

‘Thirty-two.’

‘OK, do you think we can get married to her?’

‘You’ll have to talk to my father about that,’ said Daniel.

‘She’s blond, isn’t she?’

The question sounded more like a statement and the two Danes disappeared.

Daniel had noticed several Europeans in the network that was holding him captive. Even though he had been kidnapped by Islamic extremists in the midst of a civil war in Syria, a number of those whom he saw wearing hoods spoke French and English – and even Danish. The torturers, the guards and the kidnappers were either a product of the Syrian regime, the Iraq War or of life in Europe. Several thousand Europeans, such as the Belgian Jejoen, had travelled without the slightest hindrance over the border from Turkey, and some ended up working for the same man who was making the final decisions about Daniel: Abu Athir, the Emir of Aleppo.

In other words, there was a four-lane motorway from the heart of Europe to the caliphate.

· * ·

The background of the photograph of Abu Athir was bursting with bright-green fruit trees. The sun was shining and at the emir’s side was one of his European disciples. It looked as if they were at an idyllic spot in the Syrian countryside as they stood next to each other, smiling for the camera. Abu Athir’s black hair billowed and disappeared behind his shoulders. His face was wrapped in an abundant, thick beard, broken only by a wide smile that exposed a set of snow-white teeth with two pointed canines in his upper jaw. His tight-fitting, black wool hat made him look like a hipster and his eyebrows formed a slight unibrow over his wide nose. The day the picture was taken Abu Athir was wearing a beige tunic unbuttoned at the neck, with a grey shirt underneath and practical outdoor trousers from the Swedish brand Fjällräven. He was much taller than the Frenchman beside him. The Belgian combatant Jejoen, who had come to Syria to take part in the war under the emir’s command, looked at the picture for a long time. He was fascinated by Abu Athir and there was general agreement among the Europeans that the emir was especially tough, but approachable.

You had to earn his trust, however, which is where Jejoen was having problems. Abu Athir was suspicious of him, because Jejoen’s father Dimitri was travelling around Syria looking for his son, which meant that Jejoen’s Syrian comrades suspected him of being a spy. They had found a message on Jejoen’s mobile from his father, who had mentioned some Israeli contacts. At the risk of his own life, his father had visited one rebel leader after another, including the great emir Abu Athir, who briefly detained him.

No one understood how he was released alive, but the messages and his father’s search raised suspicions about Jejoen, who was placed under house arrest in Abu Athir’s prison in the basement of the children’s hospital.

· * ·

Daniel was trying desperately to get a message home to Hedegård.

There was a new Syrian prisoner in the cell. He had been accused of having sex with his brother’s wife, because he had been seen alone with her. The judge had looked mercifully on this transgression and the Syrian was to be released once he had received his punishment: a whipping.

Daniel tore a piece off a box of penicillin tablets and wrote a message to Signe and Christina with a pen borrowed from one of the other prisoners. He wrote that he was fine, was being fed every day and had access to a toilet. They shouldn’t worry and he was sorry that he had put them in such a situation. Daniel gave the Syrian man their email addresses, so he could send the Danish message to them if he ever got the chance.

He folded the fragment of paper and the Syrian stuffed it in his back pocket.

‘What about in your underpants or socks?’ suggested Daniel. ‘A less obvious place?’

A few days after the Syrian had been released, the guards moved Daniel to a new room further down the corridor. It was a boiler room directly opposite the toilet that prisoners used if their cell didn’t have one.

It was around 17 July and Daniel had been imprisoned for two months.

· * ·

Susanne and Kjeld’s bank loan of 3.7 million kroner had been converted into US dollar bills by the Danish National Bank. They were now stacked and ready for payment with Arthur in Turkey, who, with cash in hand, was going to get Daniel back home.