‘Peter Kassig!’ shouted George one day to the American.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you like to be in the army, Peter?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you like to kill Muslims, Peter?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Don’t lie to us.’

Peter was ordered to stand up for several hours on the spot. Another time it was James who had to stand for a whole night. When this happened, the other hostages took turns staying awake and giving them water or bread if they needed it, but the Beatles even put a stop to that outbreak of solidarity. They installed a camera on top of a cupboard in the cell and hooked it up through the door and out to the terrace where they lived.

‘Now we can see every move you make,’ announced John.

Daniel stopped doing his daily sit-ups and the hostages held back from playing and talking together out of fear that it could give the British guards an excuse to punish them. The Beatles watched them through the camera, which Daniel felt pointed straight at him. They could come in at any second. He felt as if he was chained to the radiator again.

‘You’re sitting looking out the window!’ shouted John to Daniel one day.

He had just leaned his head against the cold pane. ‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘Yes, you were. I could see you.’

The mental torture also consisted of Ringo and John standing in the doorway, demanding specific answers to political questions.

‘Do you know Blackwater?’ one asked, to which the hostages would answer that it was the US security company that, among other things, was guilty of killing seventeen civilians during the Iraq War.

At other times they demanded that the hostages ask them questions to which they responded with long, preaching answers. It was a game of ‘ask a question or get beaten up’.

‘Why are you so opposed to women being educated?’ asked one hostage.

‘We don’t say that. Women should be educated in the Koran, because it is they who must raise our children. The more they learn about the Koran, the purer and better the children will be,’ one of the Brits replied and went on to talk about ‘the true path’.

Ringo said that, while living in Britain, he had phoned in to a debate on the radio and said that the western forces would lose in Afghanistan and Iraq, because God was on the Islamists’ side. The host of the show had claimed there was a problem with the connection and had hung up.

‘That is proof that there is no culture of debate in western countries,’ he said.

James asked what was the point of converting to Islam if other Muslims still considered a convert an infidel? The response from the Brits was that only God could cast doubt on the sincerity of one’s belief.

The Beatles also played the hostages off against each other. One day they gave Toni, who had converted to Islam, a whole chicken at one of the meals.

‘Toni is a good Muslim,’ they said.

‘May I share the chicken with two others?’ asked Toni.

‘Who?’

Toni suggested giving a little of his chicken to two of the other prisoners who had also converted, James and John.

‘James may not have any,’ they answered. ‘He is evil.’

Daniel tried to make himself as invisible and insignificant to the Beatles as possible; to merge into the wall and hide himself among the others as if he didn’t exist. He didn’t dare to even look at them, unlike Pierre, who was on alert whenever they were in the cell.

One day George, for the first and only time, entered without covering his face. While he stood in front of James and put a plastic cable tie around his tongue, several of the hostages paid close attention to his appearance. He was quite young, maybe in his early twenties, with shoulder-length, wavy hair, a thin beard and full lips. Terror had finally been given a face.

Daniel mostly succeeded in staying under the British guards’ radar – until one day in early February 2014, when they again asked for email addresses for Daniel’s immediate family members.

‘If you give me your girlfriend’s email address again, I’ll beat you to a pulp!’ shouted John.

Daniel gave him his mother’s email address. But he wasn’t sure if he had remembered it correctly.

Emails from the Dark

On Saturday, 8 February 2014 Susanne and Kjeld were at a birthday party at the Hedegård Community Hall. Their relative and neighbour Sven Olaf was celebrating his seventieth birthday and the room was buzzing with talkative friends and neighbours dressed up for the occasion. Under normal circumstances, Kjeld and Susanne would have enjoyed being part of this festive gathering, but not on this particular day, because, as usual, the conversation veered towards the subject of how the children were.

‘Where’s Daniel?’ their friends asked.

‘He’s off somewhere taking photos. He lives in Copenhagen,’ lied Susanne, stifling the anguish of betraying her desire to tell the truth.

Susanne and Kjeld were on tenterhooks all evening and took turns going into the bathroom to check their mobiles for any new messages. They thought it would be rude to have their phones sitting out next to the birthday cakes. Later in the evening, they went home exhausted. Kjeld went to bed and Susanne switched on the computer in the office to check her email one last time.

At 9.26 p.m. an email had arrived. She didn’t recognize the sender, loo2tome@Safe-mail.net, but opened it anyway; it was written in English and used a lot of capital letters, making it look at first glance like spam. It began:

This message is to inform you that we have taken the Denmark citizen Daniel Rye Ottosen PRISONER. It’s very simple, a CASH PAYMENT will secure his release.

Susanne held her breath as she read on.

If you want to confirm we are really the ones holding Daniel, then we will except [sic] three questions from his family of a personal nature that only Daniel could possibly be able to answer correctly.

The CONDITIONS OF DANIEL’S SAFE RETURN IS, NO MEDIA INVOLVEMENT, WHATSOEVER, AND A CASH PAYMENT!

Reply FAST, with clearly written email messages, to this email address and NO ATTACHMENTS! Act FAST, so as not to endanger the safety of Daniel.

Susanne flew out of the office and ran to the bedroom. Kjeld was still awake.

‘There’s an email from Syria!’ she shouted.

Finally, after almost nine months, the kidnappers were interested in making contact.

They’re ready to negotiate, thought Kjeld, as they forwarded the email to Arthur and called him. Arthur was on holiday with his family, travelling on some Norwegian road in the middle of nowhere. Since he had started working to find James Foley – and later Daniel – he had hardly stepped foot in Denmark. Having spent more than 275 days travelling in 2013, he had finally taken a couple of days off to spend time with his family.

‘I’ll have a look at it and send you my thoughts as soon as we get to our cabin,’ he said.

When he read the message from the kidnappers, he could see the wording and the use of capital letters were similar to the email that James’s family had received in December 2013.

Susanne and Kjeld couldn’t sleep that night. The words from the email swirled around Susanne’s head, especially the sentence about not speaking to the media. She couldn’t help but worry about what would happen if journalists wrote about Daniel anyway.

The following day they discussed their next move with Arthur and at noon they sent their reply to the kidnappers. They made sure that the proof-of-life questions would make Daniel think of something positive.

‘Assalamu alaikum, greetings,’ they began their message. They went on to explain that for nine months they had been trying to negotiate a ‘practical’ solution that could bring Daniel home, and that they had managed so far to keep the story out of the press.

Then they listed their three carefully selected questions for Daniel: ‘At which family event did Daniel give a speech shortly before his departure to Syria, and where did it take place? Where did Daniel and Signe first meet? With whom did he travel to Nepal?’