One day in December Daniel immediately became apprehensive when they dragged him out to the toilet. He was told to take off his shirt and stand up against the end wall. Ringo was holding a video camera, while the other two coached Daniel to speak into the camera and appeal to all the important and rich people in Denmark to pay a ransom, so that he could go back home to his family. They handed him the front page of a Danish tabloid, which he had to hold up in front of him while asking for help.

‘Pull yourself together!’ shouted one of the Brits. ‘Do it again!’

Daniel repeated the speech, while Ringo filmed.

‘Stooooop! You sound like a tourist, like you don’t mean it. Pull yourself together now. Do it again!’

Daniel tried to sound more frightened and after three or four takes the Brits deemed that the video was finally in the can. He put on his shirt and went back to the cell, where he and Pierre were getting ready for Christmas Eve.

They had been putting aside food from their meals for weeks. As a rule, they saved a chunk of bread, spread it with margarine and apricot jam and wrapped it in a plastic bag that lay between them while they slept. The feast grew every day as they added another piece of bread and jam. Pierre had convinced Daniel that the bread wouldn’t go mouldy if it was smeared with jam and Daniel regarded the greasy jam roll in the bag almost like a baby that was growing between them – and which they had to guard with their lives, so that they could celebrate Christmas Eve.

· * ·

In the days leading up to the first Sunday of Advent, Susanne strung Christmas lights up in the pots and bushes outside their house.

‘We’ve got to carry on living as normal, so that we don’t attract attention,’ she thought to herself. She put on some Christmas music, while placing gnomes and spruce twigs in the windows. With tears rolling down her cheeks, she tidied up the Advent wreath that stood on the table, ready for the first candle to be lit.

Susanne and Kjeld went out and ate some delicious food at an Italian restaurant, and afterwards they laughed for a while at the Christmas show at Vejle Music Hall. One Saturday Kjeld went to a Christmas party with some truck driver friends, while Susanne went to a spa, then they ate steak and drank red wine together. They tried to honour their usual Christmas traditions, both outwardly and at home. As Susanne quoted in her diary: ‘Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.’

They ate traditional pastries and drank mulled wine, cut down a Christmas tree in the forest and sent a parcel to Daniel in Syria. It contained an old work sweatshirt from Bjerre Gymnastics and Sports School with greetings written on small slips of paper in the pocket. Christina enclosed a school photo of herself and wrote her own message on the back, along with an extract from the same song her mother had been listening to: ‘I love you. I think about you every day and know that you can handle it. It’ll all work out, when the time is right. I miss you so.’ Despite this, every time Susanne stopped in the middle of the Christmas rush, she was overcome with grief.

‘Tears are words the heart can’t say,’ she wrote in her diary on 16 December.

Two days later she read an article online about former Syrian prisoners of ISIS. A fieldworker from Amnesty International in northern Syria had collected eyewitness accounts by hostages released from ISIS prisons in the Raqqa and Aleppo provinces. The prisoners had been held between May and November 2013 and they told the fieldworker how they had been detained by masked, armed men who blindfolded them and drove them to a prison cell, where they were tortured. Susanne tried to forget what she had read and hurried outside to put out some firewood that her younger brother was coming to collect the following day.

Some evenings, when the sky was clear, she would gaze for a long time at the moon that shone over Hedegård’s brown winter fields and empty roads.

‘Can you see the moon, Daniel?’ she asked quietly. ‘I wonder if you can see the moon.’

It reassured her to think that they both found themselves under the same sky. Then her son didn’t feel so far away after all.

· * ·

Arthur spent December 2013 holding meetings with his network in the border region between Turkey and Syria. He was now receiving reports that Daniel, James and the other western hostages had apparently been moved from the children’s hospital to what was thought to be a sawmill in the industrial area of Sheikh Najjar on the outskirts of Aleppo. The information didn’t surprise him, since any negotiations or access to Daniel had ground to a halt after late August. Arthur was told that the guards had demanded email addresses for all the hostages’ families. A Syrian prisoner who had since been released had overheard them being questioned. He had been sitting in a one-man cell just opposite the western hostages in the basement and heard the British guards question each of them.

In mid-December James Foley’s family received an email with the kidnappers’ demands. In return for James’s release, they demanded that the family press the US government to release Muslim prisoners, or else they wanted the astronomical sum of €100 million. The email also contained an invitation to the family to send some proof of life questions for James.

Arthur interpreted the message as a serious opening. Even if the demand was sky high, the kidnappers couldn’t be discounted as negotiators. He had seen before how kidnappers started out with enormous demands in order to suss out the families. The US authorities responded to the Foley family and rejected any question of a prisoner exchange or ransom negotiation. But that didn’t mean that the dialogue should end.

‘The starting point for all releases is dialogue,’ Arthur told the Foleys.

He thought it might be a deliberate strategy to reach out first to a family in the one country where the payment of a ransom seemed the most impossible to achieve.

The Foley family quickly got an email back with James’s answers to questions about where his brother got married, who had wept during his speech at the wedding and what position James played on the football team. But the communication stopped as suddenly as it had started. After only a few emails, before the family could begin any real negotiations, there was silence from the other end. The kidnappers wrote what they called a final message in which they insisted on €100 million in cash to release James.

Susanne and Kjeld in Hedegård were sharing a destiny with Diane and John Foley in Rochester. They too were waiting in vain for an email about their son.

· * ·

On the morning of 23 December 2013 the guards came into the cell.

‘You’re going to be released now,’ one said and declared that the rich Gulf state of Qatar had paid €260 million for all thirteen foreign hostages.

‘You have ten minutes to get ready,’ was the message.

‘May we take anything with us?’ asked one of the prisoners and got a no in reply. The hostages did some quick calculations based on Qatar’s generous €260 million and laughed − they were worth more than 11 F-16 fighter aircraft. Deep down, everyone knew very well that they were probably just being taken to a new cell.

The prospect of a move created panic in Daniel and Pierre about what would become of their Christmas Eve treat, the bread and jam that they had been assembling for several weeks and was hidden between their sleeping places.

They decided to eat it straight away, so they split it into two equal pieces. Daniel feasted on the fatty, soft, sugary mass of old bread and lavish volumes of jam, margarine and butter. It was many more calories than he had taken in for several months. When the jam roll had been consumed, he pulled on a pair of Adidas trousers, Toni’s military tunic, a pair of socks and the far-too-small turquoise sandals.