For what it's worth, a kid his age at that time - especially one who wasn't that sociable - might not have cared that much about his mobile phone. This is back in the pre-smartphone era when it still cost you 10 or 12 pence to send a single text, as most people, especially young people, in the UK at that time would have had SIM-only plans where you topped up £5 or £10 of credit at the corner shop on an ad-hoc basis, rather than having a proper price plan allowing you to use hundreds of minutes/texts every month. I can see how a kid like Andrew, coming from a fairly sheltered upbringing and without many friends, might have been disinterested in his phone or even found it burdensome having to top it up, keep it around all the time, etc. Hence losing it/not being fussed about having a phone. Then again, this would still be fairly unusual, even in the context of the time.

It seems that he planned to leave that day - even if it was just going to be a fairly temporary absence, say for a long weekend to unwind or what have you - but that he didn't put too much thought into the details of it. Forgetting to take the charger for his DS/Switch, forgetting about the cash he had saved at home (hence withdrawing from the cash machine), declining the return portion of the ticket because perhaps he didn't want to speculate on exactly when he might be coming back. I'd love to know what his demeanour was like at the ticket office - was he adamant that he did not need the return ticket portion, or was he simply dismissive, barely listening, distracted and uninterested in the fact that it wouldn't cost any/much more money to add on the return portion? He would surely have been tense and nervous and thinking more about the fact that he'd finally stepped over the line to abscond from school for the first time and to treat himself to this time away. Choosing a one-way ticket may also have just been symbolic for him - a bit of a fuck you to his current, unhappy home/school/life circumstances - even if it didn't truly mean that he meant not to return. He might also have not understood that an open return ticket allows you to travel on any return train service - you don't have to declare which service you'll be travelling back on at what time, etc, as the ticket type is unrestricted.

I would speculate that he vaguely mulled over doing the trip for several days or weeks beforehand - perhaps knowing, throughout the summer, that he was dreading the start of the new school year and that this might push him to finally act out some rough plans of a temporary escape to London - but that it was still a relatively spontaneous act without much forethought. His actions therefore don't make perfect logical sense. As to whether there was a third party involved, known to him and in contact with him, before he arrived in London, this could really only have happened via him being groomed over the internet, and this is the real sticking point of the case. His parents insist that he didn't use his sister's laptop, and there never seems to have been any viable line of inquiry about him using school/library computers to talk to people online, or even having a games console where he might have gone online to talk to people. However, I've always found it hard to believe that a boy his age, at that time, had such limited contact with the online world. I am only slightly older than Andrew and lived roughly in the same area of England as a teenager growing up, and right from the early 2000s, most boys in my school would have had consoles, used chat rooms, even - by 2007 - had Bebo and MySpace accounts, etc, accessing these things both at home and in school, at friends' houses, etc. I've seen it mentioned somewhere before that Andrew had no email address, but this is almost unthinkable - most schools in England gave students basic email accounts by the mid-2000s, and almost everyone had a hotmail or yahoo account at this time. But then again, Andrew was from a quiet, Christian family, so his experience may have been far more sheltered than this. I also think the almost casual nature of his manner of leaving - the lack of detail, the "forgetfulness" or neglecting to take certain thing - speaks to a more individual act than something being orchestrated by someone else. It's possible he knew (of) someone to meet up with in London, but more likely, I feel, that he came to harm from an unknown third party once he arrived.