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The wide pines encircled the lawn so that no one could see if Daniel ran around naked on the grass. The trees provided shade from the sun and a screen against the neighbours if you were sitting on the covered wooden terrace or on the sofa in the living room, which looked out over the garden through large, floor-to-ceiling windows.

Daniel loved being in the family’s summer house, which served as his second safe house in the weeks after his release.

He had found a picture on the Internet of the Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche, one of his guards, who had gone by the name of Abu Omar and who, by all accounts, was the perpetrator of an attack on the Jewish Museum in Belgium. Daniel had printed out a picture of Nemmouche’s face, which he had hung up in the garden. Together with Kjeld, he drank beer and used it as a target for his air rifle.

After a few days at the summer house, he went to collect Signe at the train station. He spotted her immediately when she stepped out on to the platform. She stood there with a large suitcase, dressed in pure white trainers, shorts and a tight blouse. She hadn’t changed a bit.

They embraced. Signe began to cry.

‘Well, what’s new?’ asked Daniel when they had arrived at the summer house and were sitting together in the shade on the terrace.

Signe told him about the chaotic night when she had waited for him at the airport and that she’d had a difficult time while he had been away. She had tried to be optimistic and to help where she could, and she had talked a lot with Kjeld and Susanne. But around Christmas time, when Daniel had been away for more than six months, she had tried to move forwards with her life. She had stopped doing gymnastics and had found peace in her new apartment. She finally felt that she had moved on.

Daniel couldn’t hold back the tears.

‘I can really understand,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been thinking about you so much.’

Signe had been his light in the darkness. His thoughts about her had kept him going. Suddenly it felt as if something inside him had become constricted and his sobs overwhelmed him. He wept and wept until there was nothing left but relief; relief that he knew what he had to deal with – and that Signe no longer had to worry about him.

They put Queen on the stereo and danced until they collapsed, exhausted, on the sofa, where they lay watching a dreadful film until her parents came to pick her up.

Daniel waved goodbye as Signe left in the car.

A week after Daniel had returned from Syria, he and the rest of the family stood waiting impatiently in the corridor at Rosborg High School. He was holding one long red rose and his little sister’s graduation cap.

She was behind the door, completing her very last exam in biology. In captivity Daniel had been so afraid that Christina would drop out of school.

The door finally opened and Christina came out to meet him in her sleeveless white dress, her curly hair hanging loose.

Daniel took his sister in his arms and cried on her shoulder as he hugged her so hard and for so long that his grip left marks on her arms.

Then he put the graduation cap on her head and toasted her with champagne for finishing high school, and for him being home to celebrate it with her.

Death in the Desert

Daniel dragged the bed from the small bedroom in the summer house into the living room, where the large windows let the sunlight flood in. Now and again, he went out on to the terrace and smoked a cigarette to soothe the restless quivering in his body. Otherwise, he spent most of his time in front of the computer, where he immersed himself in war documentaries such as Al-Qaeda in Yemen, Taxi to the Dark Side (about Afghan prisoners in US prisons) or Dirty Wars, about America’s secret wars. He was constantly looking for stories and films about the region in which he had been held captive.

Every evening before going to bed he checked the latest news about ISIS, which was now also going by the name, the so called Islamic State or IS.

In early July 2014 Daniel stumbled on a video circulating on the Internet in which IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared in public for the first time. Dressed in black robes and a turban, he went up the steps of the pulpit in the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul. The voluminous beard on his broad face had smatterings of grey. Young men in short-sleeved shirts stood facing Baghdadi and the black-and-white IS flag hanging on the mosque wall.

Before Friday prayers Baghdadi gave a speech about the Islamic caliphate, which now stretched across Syria from Aleppo to Raqqa, and from there eastwards into northern Iraq through Mosul and to the north-eastern province of Diyala. Al-Baghdadi had been appointed the ‘Caliph’, the supreme leader of the caliphate, and appearing in public in the middle of Mosul was a sign of defiance to the outside world. The driver in Syria who had shown Daniel a graphic of the IS areas was right: they had taken control.

When Daniel finally fell asleep, he dreamed the same dream over and over again, in which he had been kidnapped and thrown into a dark room. And when he opened his eyes in the morning, his first thought was about how James and the others were getting on in the Quarry in Raqqa.

At that time he didn’t know that the hostages had been moved. It was only months later that it became public knowledge that, at around 2 a.m. on 4 July, US elite forces in Black Hawk helicopters had flown over the border to Raqqa to free the hostages. FBI agents had spoken to some of the released hostages to locate the site where they were being detained south-east of Raqqa.

According to an anonymous American Special Operations officer, who later spoke to The New Yorker, two armed drones had circled over the area in the middle of the desert while the operation was carried out. There was a gun battle and several IS fighters were killed, but there were no hostages in the building. The elite forces unit found traces of them, but it wasn’t surprising that the hostages had been moved sixteen days after the release of Daniel and Toni. It was a tactic the Beatles used deliberately. They knew that those who had been released would be questioned by their countries’ intelligence services. While Daniel had been in captivity the guards had twice faked moving the hostages, so that those freed would return home with incorrect information.

That failed mission was the first and only attempt to rescue James and his countrymen, Steven and Peter, together with their British fellow prisoners, John, David and Alan.

In the beginning Daniel was so restless that he took trips into town and began focusing on getting started with his photography again, but he soon had to admit that he couldn’t cope with too many impressions or experiences. Being with a lot of people who didn’t know his history made him feel drained. He felt that they were pointing at him and that he had to explain to them over and over again what he had been through.

‘How terrible,’ they said, looking at him as if he were sick.

For this reason, he usually stuck to smaller groups of people, where he didn’t need to explain himself, like when he and his old friends from boarding school sailed to an island for a few days where they could just hang out and drink beer.

He flinched when someone knocked on the door or slapped a hand against a table to emphasize a point during a conversation. He recoiled if a well-meaning person happened to take hold of his wrist or touch his ribs, or when his parents embraced him as if he were a child. They obviously tried to hold back, as they had been told to, so as not to go overboard with love and affection, but at times Susanne and Kjeld felt an almost morbid concern for their son.

When Daniel needed to talk, he called his psychologist, the one who had met him in Turkey. It was going to take a while for him to return to a normal life.