Daniel could hear the three women from MSF complaining loudly in the room next door.

After only a couple of hours’ break, they were fetched again and led back to the pickups.

‘Look down between your legs,’ they were ordered.

After a short drive, they entered a courtyard, and when Daniel raised his head, he saw a large mansion in front of them. In the doorway stood the three women from MSF, wearing headscarves and arranged like a welcoming committee.

The hostages were led up a flight of stairs to the top floor and into a small bedroom. There were mattresses spread out ready on the floor and there was a toilet with a bathtub. A door led out to an enclosed terrace, where there were sofas and tables. A couple of young, clean-shaven, well-dressed guys in jeans and leather jackets asked what they would like to eat. Daniel thought he had misheard. He didn’t know what he wanted. He had forgotten what it was like to decide for himself.

‘Just chicken and fries,’ said someone.

To everyone’s surprise, their hosts brought them barbecued chicken and French fries.

The next morning, the obliging, clean-shaven hosts from the night before invited the hostages to breakfast on the terrace. The sun was still low and the morning mist lay across the Euphrates. Daniel shaped some binoculars with his forefinger and thumb and could just make out a small boat on the river. In the distance, he could see fields and the city of Raqqa, and on the other side of the river was a water treatment facility. On the neighbouring property, a satellite dish pointed east.

He drank a cup of tea, while quietly enjoying the view of the world and the Euphrates. They were between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, where some of the greatest civilizations in the history of the world first flourished: Babylon and Assyria. According to the Bible, the Euphrates sprang out of the river of Eden, along with three other streams. Daniel thought more than six months back to the time when he had tried to hang himself. He was still a hostage, yet it felt as if that had happened in a completely different world to the one he was in now.

‘This is the Islamic State,’ said their host. Daniel nodded.

The latest civilization to be found here was known for darkness and violence, except for their host who fussed over them and seemed interested in treating his western ‘guests’ well.

Breakfast consisted of tinned tuna and sardines, hummus and plenty of bread.

The first four days in the mansion-prison, which the hostages called Riverside, proceeded quietly. During the day, when the guards were present, they could walk around freely. In the evening, they sat chained together in pairs, while the women were made to cook dinner. Fully covered, they rummaged around in the kitchen, but one evening no food arrived. One of the prisoners knocked impatiently on the door to get an explanation and a female hostage came into the cell and said that there was apparently no more money for food.

Daniel tried to distract his hunger by playing games. He had hidden some cardboard in his trousers, which he took out from its hiding place. On one side he drew a chessboard and on the other, a backgammon game. Although he was still chained to the Belgian, they found a lighter in a drawer and made two chunks from a piece of candle, which they melted into cubes. They shaped the eyes on the dice with a warmed up nail and then filled them with ink.

The Belgian and Daniel also made two sets of playing cards from the bottoms of some cardboard boxes that had contained Laughing Cow cheese and some flyers with Arabic script, which they had found somewhere in the room. They didn’t think for a moment about what was on the flyers until a guard spotted the cards.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘It’s a card game we made,’ Daniel replied.

The guard took the cards from them. They had committed a great sin, because they had made playing cards out of what were apparently Jabhat al-Nusra’s recruitment flyers. They had thoughtlessly torn into pieces the Prophet’s words and verses from the Koran and turned the holy scriptures into a game with infidel kings and queens.

Daniel expected they would be punished, but life as a hostage with ISIS was unpredictable. To his great relief, nothing more happened.

Card games, tea and sardines couldn’t numb Daniel’s longing to escape. This was further encouraged by the large windows in their cell. Right out there on the other side of the glass stretched freedom. The hostages began to conduct a sort of public hearing on the topic of ‘golf’, a code name for their escape attempt. Everyone had something to say. Would it actually be possible to ‘play golf’?

Daniel shared his own experiences. He showed the scars on his wrists and throat. That was why he had tried to escape, but there was a high risk of failure – also, they were in the middle of ISIS’s stronghold in winter, when it would be possible to see them for miles in their orange jumpsuits.

‘It isn’t enough just to be out on the other side of the window,’ he said.

Some of the hostages argued that it was better to die free than to rot in captivity. Pierre would rather flee than allow ISIS to get money for him, if indeed that ever became an issue.

David, who had experience from the British military, strongly advised that they reflect on the matter, because statistically the vast majority of hostages are released through successful negotiations. An escape would have to be arranged and planned down to the smallest detail, he said, because escape attempts often ended in death. It might well have been an escape attempt that had cost Kenneth Bigley his life. According to the Sunday Times, Bigley had managed to escape from his captors with the help of a Syrian and an Iraqi, who had infiltrated the group. But after a short time on the run, Bigley had been recognized at a checkpoint, even though he had been disguised. This example was one of several that supported the notion that escape attempts often ended up going wrong – even if one had outside help.

‘I know the odds,’ David insisted. ‘I’m betting on coming out through negotiations.’

Even so, Daniel whispered in Pierre’s ear that he would join him if he planned to escape.

Despite the grim statistics, there was agreement among the hostages that they could at least explore the possibilities. They delegated tasks to each other. Some of them had to keep an eye on what was happening outside the windows, so that they could understand when the guards came and went, what weapons they carried, who replaced whom, how many guards were in and around the mansion, and how to attack a guard and steal his car.

The hostages created a document in which they noted what they had seen. They were cautious and wrote in code, as if it were player rankings from a card tournament. They were always ready to swallow the most dangerous notes.

David was the voice of pragmatism.

‘You have to convince me it’s possible,’ he said and asked the others to find patterns in the guards’ activities that could be exploited. For example, did the guards sleep before dinner at a certain time or was there a period during the day when there were fewer of them?

They took notes as they watched through the windows and saw cars driving to and from the mansion; when the guards checked the cell and brought food; and where and how many lookouts there were.

The Americans thought that they had to work fast, because it was perhaps the last chance they would get before they were again moved to a basement cell without windows.

They watched the guards for four days, but there was no regularity in their activities. There didn’t seem to be any regular routines.

There is no damn pattern at all! Try finding a pattern in the Middle East, thought Daniel.

Their escape plans were given the final death knell when the Beatles moved into the closed terrace next to their cell. Only a thin curtain and a window pane separated the hostages from their worst guards. At any moment, John or George could pull aside the curtain and monitor every movement the nineteen men were making. It gave Daniel the chills. It was as if the curtain and the side of the room where it hung had become toxic. Now it was just about survival, because the British guards seemed more unpredictable than ever.