On 14 September 2007, 14-year-old Andrew Gosden walked out of the family home in Doncaster, boarded a train to London with a one-way ticket and then simply vanished.

A short sequence of CCTV stills captured that morning at King’s Cross station represents the last certain sighting of the schoolboy.

A decade on, his disappearance remains a mystery.

The Gosden family – Kevin, Glenys, Charlotte and Andrew – were about to sit down for dinner on the evening of Friday 14 September.

Charlotte was in her room on her new laptop, while Andrew was thought to be in the converted cellar of the Gosdens’ house in the suburb of Balby, playing on his console, just as he usually did after school.

But when the shout went out to come and eat, he didn’t emerge.

In Andrew’s bedroom his family found his McAuley Catholic High School blazer and tie hanging neatly over the back of a chair. Later they discovered his shirt and trousers in the washing machine.

After a series of increasingly frantic phone calls, they learned he had not been to school that day.

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Image caption

Andrew pictured with sister Charlotte and father Kevin

His sister Charlotte, now 26, said: “It was just a complete panic. We initially thought something must have happened on the way to school.

“When we found that he hadn’t even been to school – even tried to go to school – that was even more worrying.”

It emerged Andrew had put on his uniform and left the house but then waited for his family to leave before returning home.

He dressed in a pair of jeans and one of his favourite T-shirts and headed out the door.

On the way to the railway station he withdrew just under £200 from his bank account and bought a one-way ticket to London.

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Later that morning, and hours before he was noticed missing, in the words of his father Kevin, “he apparently just disappeared off the face of the Earth”.

“It’s psychologically impossible to deal with,” he said.

“You go round and round in circles thinking, ‘Well probably they’ve been murdered, maybe they committed suicide, perhaps they are alive and well somewhere’ and it might just depend on what day of the week it is.”

Andrew has been described by his family as a quiet, gentle and extremely intelligent boy who took part in the government’s Young, Gifted & Talented Programme for high-achieving students.

He liked reading – well-thumbed copies of The Lord of the Rings and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy still sit on a shelf in his room – he played computer games and he enjoyed his music: Slipknot, Muse and Funeral for a Friend were among his favourite bands.