A lot of money has been collected for the family and they now have more than half of what is expected to be needed to free Daniel. There are a number of private companies and business people who have chosen to support the collection. But it has also to a large degree been the breadth of support from the community, where the ‘many small streams’ have made such a difference.

While the family in Hedegård was in a race against time, in mid-April happy pictures of the four released Frenchmen made news around the world. Because France had the exact opposite approach to hostage negotiations as Denmark, when they landed on French soil in front of rolling cameras the released hostages were greeted by a welcome committee consisting of President François Hollande and Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.

‘France is proud to have been able to secure their release,’ said Hollande as he stood beside the four men.

Pierre tried to blend in with the asphalt and stood furthest away from the president and Didier François, who gave a speech, saying how great it was to be free and back ‘out in the open’. Pierre felt uncomfortable about being seen with the president and about the state making such a big deal out of his release. Moreover, this was what the Beatles had warned against: talking to the press while negotiations about other hostages were still ongoing.

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When the Frenchmen left the Quarry in Raqqa, the remaining prisoners were divided into Muslims and non-Muslims. James, John, Peter and Toni were escorted into another room diagonally opposite. Daniel, Dan and his colleague Federico, Alan, Steven and David stayed in the cell where they had always been and where there was suddenly so much space they could turn around without getting someone else’s foot in their crotch.

Daniel used the space to train himself to run a marathon in a circle on the floor. As he ran round and round on a blanket, so that he didn’t make a noise, he updated Dan about how it was going. He was in poor shape, so he started out gently with a daily distance of what he loosely calculated had to be about two kilometres, when the running circle was about nine metres and he ran 220 laps.

His training programme was interrupted when a new hostage was thrown into the cell.

‘Get to know him well – he’s going to be here a long time,’ said one of the Beatles, slamming the door behind him.

The man was of dark complexion and seemed to be in his mid-fifties. What little hair he had left was grey and he wore a long, grey tunic. He had a frightened look in his eyes and asked in poor English who these people were that had taken him. The hostages offered him food and water, but he declined and prayed to Allah. A few hours later, George came into the cell with a marker pen and some sheets of A4 paper and ordered the remaining hostages who weren’t from Britain or the United States to write exactly the words he dictated. With the marker, Daniel wrote:

I don’t want to end like him. Pay 2 M. Go to Danish Government.

Daniel accidentally wrote the ‘G’ in ‘Government’ backwards and George kicked him in the side, screwed up the paper and gave Daniel a new sheet to start again. Maybe it was fear, but Daniel wrote the ‘G’ backwards again. George gave up and made Federico write Daniel’s message instead.

Daniel’s brain was running at full speed. ‘I don’t want to end like him.’ What the hell did that mean? And why weren’t Alan, Steven and David, who were sitting in the same room, writing a similar message? Daniel, Federico, Dan and the Belgian were asked to follow, while Toni, who had also written a note, was dragged out from the other room, where the Muslim converts were sitting. For the first time, they didn’t have their hands tied behind their backs, only blindfolds. Daniel, Federico and Toni were pushed into the back seat of a car, while Dan and the Belgian were in another car.

‘Do you know what you’re going to do?’ asked George cheerfully from the driver’s seat.

No one answered.

‘You’re going to watch someone be executed,’ he said. He told them that the man who was to be executed was a North African spy who worked for the West, which was why the ISIS sharia court had sentenced him to death for espionage.

‘And you’re going to watch. Don’t worry, you’re OK.’

The Brit began playing music in the car, a nasheed, an ISIS Islamic hymn, and he chanted along as they drove.

‘Stay in your seats,’ ordered George when the car stopped.

The door opened and a hand gripped Daniel’s arm. He got out of the car and could feel through his thin sandals that he was walking through sand and scattered pebbles. George pushed the blindfold down around Daniel’s neck so that he could see a desert landscape with scattered tufts of grass – and a bulldozer. He led Daniel and the other four hostages in front of a hole, the size of which was similar to what an excavator could take with a shovelful.

The middle-aged man from the cell was on his knees next to the hole, in his grey tunic and a reddish-yellow blindfold. His hands were tied together with a strip of fabric and it struck Daniel that the Beatles weren’t going to waste a pair of handcuffs on a dead man.

The hostages were asked to hold their A4 sheets up in front of them. The wind was gusting strongly and Daniel held his paper tight, so it wouldn’t blow out of his hands.

The man’s lips were moving in a final prayer. John was standing behind him with his Glock pistol; Ringo was filming from the other side of the grave, and George was choreographing the entire scene.

‘Look into the camera and hold your pages towards the camera!’ shouted Ringo.

‘Don’t fuck up, Daniel, or we’ll shoot you!’ George chimed in, picking on Daniel even more.

The wind threw the warm desert air into Daniel’s face as he gazed at the praying, condemned man and gripped his page.

John took a few steps back and shot the man in the back of the head, so that he toppled over, head first, then landed on his back with his legs against the wall of the grave. The sound of the shot from the pistol cut through the wind and blasted through Daniel’s eardrums with such force that it felt as if they were exploding.

John went over to the grave, targeted his pistol at the already dead man and sent eight more shots into his chest. Blood was pouring through the victim’s reddish-yellow blindfold and out on to the cracked desert floor at the bottom of the pit. Ringo panned with his camera from the executed man and up to the five hostages who were kneeling like sand sculptures by the edge of the hole with their messages in front of them. Daniel stared at the man’s lifeless body and felt a sense of relief that death happened so quickly when it finally came. The Beatles had talked so much about beheadings that it was a relief to see that they could also use a firearm.

The hostages were ordered to climb down into the grave, after which Ringo took photographs of the hostages with his SLR camera. Daniel was between Dan and Toni, and while they held up their papers to the camera, Ringo took a series of photos with at least two hostages in each.

‘Look into the camera!’ shouted Ringo to Daniel, who was staring down at the corpse by his feet.

When Daniel raised his head and looked towards the camera, which Ringo was holding in front of his face, the Brit shouted, ‘Noooooo, stop staring at me!’

On their way back to the cell, Ringo leaned towards Daniel and whispered in his ear, ‘Want to hear a secret? You’re next.’

Daniel’s heart was pounding. Ringo was right. If his family didn’t collect the money fast enough, they could use him as blackmail in the other cases. They probably wouldn’t kill an MSF worker, Italy would pay for Federico, and the Americans and British were worth more politically than a man from a small country.

When they returned to the cell, Steven, Alan and David asked what had happened. While Daniel and the four others had been forced to watch the execution for the proof-of-life video, the Americans and the British had been left in uncertainty. Daniel didn’t want to express his fears in front of others who had been given no sign that negotiations for their release were taking place. Instead, he went over to Dan, who, thanks to his employer paying the ransom, would soon be on his way out. Still afraid that Ringo was right, Daniel began desperately writing down names of people his family could contact in order to help raise the ransom. He used a green ballpoint to draft a list that Dan could take home to his family: names of business and media people, politicians, trade unions, ‘the Queen and more’.