Jack’s last movements

» Jack went to the pub with student friends in Hotwells, then back to a house party, before leaving at around 2.50am on the morning of March 2.

For the next half an hour, possibly more, it appears he walked around the Cumberland Basin, trying to find a taxi, or a bus home.

The Cumberland Basin is a maze of road bridges, slip roads, steps and footpaths around and over where three bodies of water – the New Cut, the Cumberland Basin at the end of Bristol’s Floating Harbour, and the River Avon at the start of the Avon Gorge – meet.

Despite being the middle of the night, the roads were not deserted. A regular stream of traffic is visible on the CCTV cameras that are located around the area. Jack is seen going one way and then the other.

No one knows quite what he was doing, but it looks most likely that, after approaching one taxi driver in Hotwells and being told it wasn’t available, he thought his best chance of seeing a taxi for hire would be on the busiest road, the A370 Brunel Way, which connects the Portway with South Bristol at Ashton Gate.

This was ultimately, the way to his home in Flax Bourton, five miles further down the A370 into North Somerset. The last sighting of him on CCTV appears to be Jack about to make a second crossing of the Plimsoll Swing Bridge, this time going south up one of the slip roads for traffic coming off the bridge and heading onto the Portway. There’s a wide pavement here, but after that, he doesn’t appear on CCTV.

Much of the police’s efforts – and now the family’s – have focused on Jack’s phone. It was still on and able to receive data three hours later, before stopping being active on the network at 6.44am.

At 5.40am, after his parents realised he hadn’t made it home, the ‘Find my Phone’ function showed Jack was still in the Hotwells area. The family have said this placed him at a specific address in the Granby Hill area, near to that slip road. The police are less certain, pointing out that – as anyone who has tried to rely on Find my Phone while watching someone’s little dot move around a map will know – it’s a function that relies on pings from various phone mast towers, and is usually a computer algorithm’s ‘best guess’ rather than anything completely reliable.

What the police do know, however, is that Jack’s phone never left the Hotwells and Cumberland Basin area at any point from the moment he left the party to it switching off from the network, which means that if Jack and his phone were never parted, neither did he.