Pierre spoke about his elderly Spanish father, who had lived through the Spanish Civil War. His parents’ house was an hour’s train journey from Paris in an abandoned factory that had been Pierre’s childhood home, surrounded by fruit trees and the roar of the river that flowed past at the end of the garden. Pierre had left home several years earlier, but Tonton the donkey still lived in the garden, and Olaf the dog also ran around among the free-range geese that often peeked into the living room through the garden door.

Daniel didn’t know what he would do if Pierre disappeared. Their talks kept the fear and the madness at bay.

· * ·

On 4 August Kjeld was sitting in his lorry when he received an email from Arthur with an image file attached. He waited until he went home to Susanne before downloading the file.

Arthur had written in the email that it was a new photo of Daniel. Kjeld and Susanne agreed that this time they didn’t need the crisis psychologist to be present. They felt able to see the image alone and besides they wanted to save on the cost of the psychologist, who would surely be needed when Daniel came home.

When the photograph appeared on the computer screen in their study, they went completely quiet. A wild man in a white shirt was staring directly at them through round, sunken eyes. He had a beard and hair that stuck out all around his head.

Susanne and Kjeld wept, while staring at the picture. Their son looked so abject, as Susanne described it, and he had some ugly marks around his neck. They could no longer be ignored; the marks were even clearer than in the first picture they had received.

‘Do you think they’ve tried to strangle him?’ asked Suzanne. Kjeld didn’t dare answer.

It was only when they had been looking at the photo for quite a while that they noticed the smile. Daniel was trying to send a message that he would be all right, thought Susanne.

When Daniel’s elder sister Anita saw the photo, she thought he looked exactly like their father when he had been ill with cancer, with his prominent cheekbones and hollow eyes. She said that the marks around his neck could be a fungal growth, which you could get if you were malnourished.

‘I’ll take that her word for it,’ Susanne wrote in her diary. There was so incredibly little for the family to hold on to.

Two photos in more than two months, when they had neither heard Daniel’s voice nor had any idea what was going to happen to him. At the same time there was the forced silence. Daniel’s disappearance was a secret outside the family’s inner circle.

Susanne had told only three trusted colleagues at Legoland, otherwise she couldn’t stand talking about it. It was hard enough already. While visitors rode the carousels at the theme park, she stood in the staffroom and received calls from Arthur and the authorities, who had questions or new reports about her kidnapped son. Sometimes she wept; other times she felt hopeful.

‘Tell lies which are as close to reality as possible,’ Arthur had advised them when Kjeld and Susanne recounted how they were getting lost in the web of lies they told to everyone else about Daniel’s whereabouts.

They had cancelled going to a party, because they couldn’t handle lying to their friends. They excused themselves by saying they had the flu. When the host asked them some weeks later about their illness, they had no idea for a moment what she was talking about. Kjeld and Susanne were living a double life.

· * ·

On the same day as they received the photograph of Daniel in Hedegård, he and the other six prisoners were joined in their cell by another hostage.

‘We have a friend for you,’ announced a guard.

The American journalist Steven Sotloff lay down in the only place there was room – the middle of the floor. He said that he had been captured shortly after crossing the border from Turkey and that the many checkpoints on the roads in the area were no longer controlled by the original Syrian rebels. Now ISIS fighters were standing there.

There were now eight westerners in the same cell. Somewhere else in the basement under the children’s hospital were James Foley and John Cantlie. Daniel had seen them, but would not meet them until several days later. It finally happened when the prisoners were going to the toilet.

As always, they were ordered to go in single file down the corridor, blindfolded. Daniel never knew if anyone was standing there ready to give him a slap. They didn’t take their blindfolds off until the door to the toilets was closed and locked behind them.

James was standing between two sinks and first greeted Federico and David, whom he knew already, after which he presented himself to Daniel, who kept a little in the background.

‘Hi, I’m Daniel,’ he replied.

‘We’ve heard a lot about you,’ said John, and James smiled broadly. James had a bit of an underbite and a beard on his chin. During his imprisonment, he had converted to Islam and wore a long tunic. Daniel couldn’t take his eyes off James, who was finishing at the sink. A grown man, thought Daniel, who washed himself calmly as if he were standing in his bathroom in the United States.

‘See you,’ James said to the group, before a guard led him away.

When the other hostages returned to their cell, they talked a little about James and John.

‘They look much better than they did when we were in the Box,’ David remarked and Federico nodded in agreement. The Box was the nickname for the prison the two of them had previously been in with James and John, near the city of Atme in Idlib province.

While there, they had been under the control of three British guards. David and Federico were reluctant to talk about what these three men had subjected them to.

James and John were in a cell at the end of the corridor with a German and, for a few weeks, a fourth fellow prisoner. He wasn’t exactly a hostage in the same way as them. He had privileges. The Belgian fighter Jejoen was under house arrest, part of the time in the same room as the three westerners, but every now and then Abu Athir gave him permission to move freely around the building.

The others in the cell were also treated well. They were given copied pages from books about Islam and a French guard, Abu Mohammad, gave James permission to take a bath, which was unusual. Abu Mohammad would also sit in the cell occasionally and talk to them. An Iraqi guard, Abu Mariyam, bought cakes for them in the market and Jejoen joked around with James and John.

Jejoen had a good relationship with the Dutch prison warden, Abu Ubaidah, so sometimes he went into the kitchen and cooked, while also watching Abu Hurraya beating prisoners in the office or blasting them with the stun gun.

Jejoen noticed the piles of clothes that had piled up under the stairs to the ground floor. He was convinced they belonged to executed prisoners, because he had seen some prisoners being led away one day and the next day he recognized one of their shirts in the bundle.

His trip to Syria was far from being the adventure he had dreamed of. All he wanted was to go back to Belgium and to his father, who was still looking for him.

· * ·

In the second half of August 2013 Arthur’s assistant Majeed met Emir Abu Athir and the prison leader Abu Ubaidah in a building close to the children’s hospital in Aleppo. He had bought a small camera in Turkey, so that he could record a video of Daniel.

It seemed that Majeed had won over their confidence a bit, because they told him that Daniel had tried to commit suicide by hanging himself from a chain to which he had been shackled to the ceiling. The guards had heard a loud noise from inside the room, hurried in and found Daniel dangling from the ceiling. They had arrived just in time to save him. But Majeed was also lied to.

‘Daniel has converted,’ said Abu Ubaidah in his quiet voice. ‘He is now called Abu Aisha.’