Around noon one day in November there was heavy hammering on the door and concerns greater than how many dots were in the tub arrived in the shape of the three British guards. Daniel was kneeling with his face against the wall, but he recognized their accent from the day when the Brit’s unpleasant visit had turned Federico’s and David’s faces deathly pale.

Daniel stiffened, while the Brits went around the room selecting individual hostages, who were given a few blows on the torso. He could hear that they were being tough on Steven, accusing him of writing articles that were untrue. They also circled David for a long time.

One of the guards asked them, one by one, to say what they knew about Dawlah al-Islamiyah, the Arabic name for ISIS.

Daniel deliberately kept his answer very short.

‘Your goal is to create an Islamic state where you implement sharia law,’ he said.

The three Brits talked about the policies of western countries against Muslims and about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘Why are you sitting here? Because you support your stupid governments,’ said one of them.

‘Is there anyone who knows what democracy means?’ continued the lesson. ‘It comes from Latin. Demos means “people”, kratos means “power”. And who are the people? The people, that’s you. So you are the sinners.’

After that day the hostages began to see the three hooded British guards more frequently. They nicknamed them the Beatles. That way, they could talk about John, Ringo and George, without the guards detecting that the prisoners were speaking about them.

The Beatles were always dressed in black hoods, desert boots and black or military green clothing, but several of the hostages in the cell noted that their hands were dark-skinned. They guessed that they came from Pakistan and had perhaps met each other in a mosque in London.

George was the most violent and unpredictable of the three and sometimes he held his nose while he walked around the cell, talking or telling bad jokes. According to David and Federico – and also James, who had encountered George earlier in his captivity – he had gone from being quiet to aggressive and domineering. Ringo, on the other hand, seemed to be reserved, while John was articulate.

Daniel hardly dared to listen when they were in the cell, so he often couldn’t tell them apart. But it was immaterial – as a trio, they were frightening. Whether they came in together or separately, the forewarning was always a strong, bitter-sweet scent of male perfume that wafted into the room while they stood outside the door, waiting for the hostages to turn to face the wall before they entered. Sometimes Daniel thought he could smell when they were coming, but it usually turned out to be a false alarm. Every time the prisoners sensed a whiff of perfume, there was panic.

· * ·

Towards the end of 2013, while Daniel and his fellow prisoners in Aleppo had fallen under the control of British jihadists, James Foley’s family in the United States were approached by the father of a returned Syrian combatant. At the beginning of November Dimitri, Jejoen Bontinck’s father, called James’s brother Michael with the message that his son had apparently met James in a prison in Aleppo.

The family had been getting calls for several months from various people, each one more well-informed and well-intentioned than the next. Common to all of them was that they claimed to know where James was being held, without it ever leading to anything new. Even so, Michael thought that Dimitri’s story was worth passing on to Arthur, who had been looking for James for about a year without success. Arthur listened to the long message that Jejoen’s father had recorded. Dimitri spoke stridently, quickly and incoherently, but Arthur decided to contact him anyway to find out what it was really about.

Dimitri said his son had become radicalized and had gone to Syria to fight.

‘I’ve been in Syria looking for him,’ he continued, at which Arthur couldn’t suppress a little smile. When Dimitri’s son finally returned home, after more than six months, he had been imprisoned by the Belgian authorities on suspicion of committing terrorist acts in Syria and of being a member of ISIS, in the days when he wasn’t under house arrest. Jejoen’s testimony added to the public prosecutor’s case against forty-seven members of Sharia4Belgium, including himself. According to Dimitri, Jejoen had told him that he had been held in the same cell as James for several weeks in the basement of a children’s hospital in Aleppo.

When Arthur hung up, he sat back with a strange gut feeling. During the past few months he had spoken with hundreds of people who said they knew James’s whereabouts. Their only motive had been money. But what in heaven’s name would prompt a young Belgian jihadist to fabricate a story about having met James? he asked himself. The only motive Arthur could imagine was immunity, meaning that Jejoen hoped he might be released if he gave information about a well-known, kidnapped American in Syria. There were several details in Dimitri’s story that aroused Arthur’s curiosity, since much of his information about Daniel had also been obtained from released Syrians who had been held in the same prisons.

In the United States the FBI didn’t think Arthur should spend even a second of his valuable time on the returned Belgian fighter. Even though the Syrian regime denied that James was in one of their prisons, this possibility was the only lead that Arthur had been asked to prioritize by the FBI. Prominent sources in the regime said that not even President Assad would necessarily know if there was an American in one of the secret prisons, because when prisoners were registered, their name was thrown away and the prisoner reduced to a number. It would be difficult to find the person without being able to match a name with a number. Moreover, it wasn’t inconceivable that a general or a colonel somewhere in the system had ‘stashed Foley away’ as an insurance policy. If the regime fell, releasing him could be a ticket out.

‘We have to use our scarce resources to follow the lead in Damascus,’ was the message from the US. But Arthur, ignoring the FBI’s view on the matter, followed his gut feeling and flew to Antwerp, Belgium.

Through Dimitri, Arthur obtained a permit to visit Jejoen under the guise of being a family member who had come from the United States to welcome him home.

The high-security prison couldn’t deny the prisoner a family visit, but if he came for investigative purposes, the police had to be involved. Arthur wanted to avoid the latter at all costs. He could already imagine how authorization for the visit would evaporate in red tape and delays.

Before going through the prison security search, Arthur wrote a number of names on the broad palm of his hand that he wanted to check with the fighter. Abu Athir, Abu Ubaidah and Abu Suheib were among them; he wanted to know what they looked like and where they had been staying. He had also rolled up his shirt sleeves and hidden a mini ballpoint pen in the cuffs so the wardens didn’t discover it when he went into the visiting room.

It looked like a classroom with small desks, and the visitors and inmates were only allowed to sit in specifically designated chairs. The prison wardens walked between the tables, keeping an eye on things; pen and paper were not allowed.

A few moments later Arthur was sitting opposite Jejoen, whose dark skin came from his Nigerian mother. Arthur spoke quietly and honestly from the beginning.

‘I’m not a member of James’s family. But I’m not from the intelligence services, either. I’m looking for James on behalf of his family. I’m also looking for a Dane called Daniel.’

‘I’ve seen James and heard about the Dane,’ said Jejoen.

In order to verify his statements, Arthur asked him to explain how he had ended up under the children’s hospital in Aleppo.