James had finally found peace from his torment and now the family was trying to find its way back from the darkness. Mark and his wife Kasey were expecting their first child.

‘His name will be James Foley,’ Kasey said proudly of her unborn son as she stood in the kitchen in slippers, caressing her belly.

The service was set to begin at 10 a.m. Everyone emptied their coffee cups and put on their shoes and coats to go to the church. Kasey kept her slippers on when the family went out to the car. Diane insisted on sitting next to Daniel in the back seat; she took his hand and held it tight, while John drove in silence towards the church.

Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church in Rochester was packed with family and friends. In front of the altar was a picture of James Wright Foley. He was smiling his charming, lopsided grin, which by all accounts had brought him great success with women. Yellow and red flowers encircled his face, the eyes giving a sense of the affectionate troublemaker he was.

There was no coffin to put in the grave. James’s body had already been laid to rest somewhere in Syria. His family couldn’t bring themselves to look at the last image the world had seen of him: a body in an orange prison uniform lying on its stomach in the desert with the arms by its sides. On top of the body, between the shoulder blades, was the head.

Most of the media had refrained from showing the ISIS propaganda video of James’s murder. Daniel had watched it only to ensure that James was finally at peace. He had so many other images of James etched on to his brain and they flooded back to him as he sat in one of the front pews, staring straight ahead. His white shirt lit up like a moon against the dark jackets filling the church.

He thought back to one year earlier, 18 October 2013, when they had been together in captivity. Late in the evening James had casually remarked that it was his fortieth birthday. Daniel and the other prisoners had congratulated him and said they hoped his birthday would be better the following year.

Now Daniel was sitting in front of a photo of James, while Michael wept through his speech about a warm and loving big brother who had fought for a better world.

‘James died for what he believed in,’ he said.

Daniel could see James in Michael. He leaned forwards and put his elbows on his knees, his broad back shaking uncontrollably. It was the James he had known that Michael was describing to the guests; the James who always had time for others – even when they all knew that James might end up dying in captivity.

Daniel took off his glasses and sobbed towards the church floor, unable to repress a desperate wail, which came thundering out in convulsions from his stomach and along his spine. He let it all come flooding out for the first time since August, when Arthur had told him the news of James’s death. He wiped away the tears with both hands, exposing the red scars around his wrists. They were imprinted into his skin like tattooed bracelets. Daniel put on his glasses again and looked towards the altar with flushed cheeks.

‘Happy birthday, Jim,’ concluded the priest, and the congregation said a prayer for all the refugees in the world and the Syrians who were living in a bloody warzone for the third year. They finished the service by singing ‘I Am the Bread of Life’.

Outside the church, Daniel smoked another cigarette.

‘A demon has just left my body,’ he remarked to Arthur, before he screamed out loud to himself and to the autumn air: ‘James, you asshole! I miss you! Why the hell did you have to go and die?’

The family drove out to the graveyard. A flat grey headstone lay in the grass, surrounded by red maple leaves and yellow flowers. Diane put her arm around her mother’s shoulders as they stood in a semicircle and silently prayed. The clouds cleared and the sun’s rays hit the burial plot. Daniel looked at James’s headstone. It read: ‘A man for others’.

‘Look, here comes the sun. It turned out to be a bright day after all,’ commented Diane.

After the ceremony James’s family paid tribute to his life by holding a reception at the church. His former nanny remarked that he had died dressed in the bright orange colour of life, while the executioner wore the black robes of Satan. The priest, Reverend Paul, recalled one of the last evenings when he had eaten dinner with the family before James travelled to Syria.

‘I said to James that his brothers and his sister were not thrilled about his decision to travel to Syria, back into the lion’s den. “Father,” James answered. “I have to go back and tell the stories of the Syrian people. They’re living under a dictator who tramples all over them as if they were grass.”’ Reverend Paul added: ‘Here, we have food on our table, but we have no idea what the Syrian people are going through. I know that James’s mission came from the heart.’

Diane stood in the same spot for several hours, receiving condolences from the guests, who stood in a queue that wound around the entire room.

‘God bless you all,’ she whispered.

The next morning Daniel impulsively bought a sweater featuring New Hampshire’s revolutionary war motto ‘Live Free or Die’. Arthur and he also bought a couple of beers, some water and biscuits from an old lady’s convenience store and drove out to the enormous forest surrounding Lake Winnipesaukee, where James had spent time as a child.

Daniel pulled the burgundy ‘Live Free or Die’ sweater over his head and wandered with Arthur along the humid forest paths for hours, getting lost between the bare trunks and russet leaves. Daniel took a deep breath. It was just as quiet as it had been sometimes in captivity – or back in the field near his childhood home in Hedegård. He knew what it felt like to long for death rather than life. Among the tree trunks, in the clinging mud that weighed down their shoes, he shouted, ‘That’s my motto from now on, Arthur: Live Free or Die!’

The Elite Gymnast from Hedegård

Daniel clapped his hands at the audience from the stage of the Ocean theme park in Hong Kong. It was 15 July 2011 and he was dressed in a seahorse costume on a light-blue stage decorated with painted coral. Below him, he could see people with umbrellas shading themselves from the sun. Techno rhythms were booming so loudly from the speakers that parents had to shout to their children, who sat in folding chairs eating ice cream.

He looked up to where he could just make out a platform against the sky, which was at a height of twenty-five metres. He had to climb up there, jump off – and land in a three-metre deep pool. It was the climax of the show.

He pulled off the costume that fitted his body like a wetsuit and threw it away from him. The audience was enthusiastically cheering the blond, fit, tanned twenty-two-year-old Dane in his black bathing trunks, who was now beginning to climb up to the platform. Every muscle in his body was tense. This was the moment for which he had been rehearsing and waiting.

After a few weeks of performing, he had become tired of being a bouncing seahorse turning somersaults on a trampoline. He would rather be the cool, bare-chested diver, who jumped off the tower in a high dive. Daniel was a perfectionist and, even though this was just a holiday job in a Hong Kong arena, he had insisted on learning how to dive.

When he reached the platform, there was barely room for his feet. He stood on the small square, leaning against the metal behind him and clapped to get the audience going. Then he turned around and jumped out in a backward somersault.

The landing had to be precise − legs first, side by side. If he hit the surface askew or his legs were too spread out at the moment of landing, then, because of the entry speed, water would be forced up his rear end. Afterwards, it would be like he was pissing out of his backside, which he felt would be inelegant when he should be taking the applause from the audience.