Ten days on, what on earth DID occur to lacking Jay?

You can buy almost anything on Veronica’s Strip, a neon-lit parade of bars and clubs that runs parallel to the black-sand beach of Playa de las Americas.

Walking through crowds of scantily-clad young Brits in the early hours of yesterday, I was assailed by street vendors offering ­everything from sunglasses and jewellery to ­‘hashish’, laughing gas balloons, ‘sexy ladies’ and class-A drugs.

A 30-something man with the accent of a Cockney market trader was bellowing ‘pills and powder’ to passers-by. He meant ecstasy and cocaine, and wasn’t short of takers.

Leaning against cars, across the pavement from packed venues pumping out dry ice and high-decibel dance music, was the muscle: small groups of burly eastern European men, with forearms like Popeye. They kept a beady and somewhat sinister eye on proceedings.

It was just another night in the narco-fuelled party capital of the Canary Islands — where the music only stops when the sun comes up, and another raucous summer is just getting started.

You couldn’t pick a more different setting to the stunning little village of Masca, an hour’s drive north, where a very different British invasion is under way.

This tiny and secluded community, consisting of a handful of tumble-down homes perched on the side of a mountain in the Rural de Teno national park, is playing host to a full-blown media circus.

For ten days, rescue workers have been scouring this breathtakingly beautiful valley from dawn to dusk in search of Jay Slater, the missing teenager who was last seen walking out of the village just after 8am.

Each morning, a fresh convoy of film crews and rescue workers drive the auto-route that connects the vibrant towns and beach resorts around Playa de las Americas — where the 19-year-old apprentice bricklayer spent the night before his disappearance partying on Veronica’s Strip — with the unspoiled north of the island.

They then turn inland and navigate the ­narrow and hairy road to Masca, taking a series of hairpin bends down the side of a 2,000 ft ravine in the process. Slater, who had spent the previous three days (and nights) at the ‘New Rave Generation’ dance festival on Veronica’s Strip took this very route at around 5am on Monday, June 17.

For some reason he had jumped into the car of two much older men, whom he seems to have only recently met. They drove from the Papagayo beach club, on the end of Veronica’s Strip, all the way to a tiny Airbnb in the remote village. By 8.50am, the teenager from Oswaldtwistle in ­Lancashire had vanished into thin air. No one has seen him since.

Little about Jay Slater’s strange disappearance seems to add up. In fact, with each passing day, the questions appear only to multiply, fuelled by an outpouring of rumour and supposition on social media. Yet there is one aspect of this case that almost everyone seems to agree on, from local officials, to friends and family, to the investigators poring over the evidence about his last known moves.

It is that drugs — and perhaps the drug trade — which keep the flesh-pots of this raucous party island running are in some way responsible for the series of events that led to Jay Slater’s disappearance.

The ‘free availability of drugs’ on the island is ‘worrying’ is how Mark Williams-Thomas, a former detective acting as a spokesman for the family, put it ­yesterday. ‘In the past 24-48 hours, information has come to light that gives rise to concern that drugs are a worrying aspect here.’

Events leading to Slater’s disappearance began on Friday, June 14, when he arrived in Tenerife with two friends: Brad Hargreaves and a recent acquaintance called Lucy Mae Law.

It was the first time the boys had been on a solo holiday, but Law is a seasoned traveller. An 18-year-old college student, who lives with her parents, her social media accounts reveal that she visited Malta and Milan in May, Ibiza in April, Barcelona in March, and Malaga in February, often attending dance music festivals. Last summer, she can be seen partying in Jamaica, Tenerife, Zante, Benidorm and Budapest.

The trio stayed at the three-star Paloma Beach apartment complex in Los Cristianos, just outside Playa de las Americas. On Sunday, the final night of the dance music ­festival, proceedings unfolded at the Papagayo beach club on the northern end of Veronica’s Strip.

Pictures and videos of the all-night rave show Slater touring the dancefloor. Sometimes he’s in a grey

T-shirt with green shoulders. On other occasions he’s topless. At all times, a black bag, with thick straps, is hanging from his shoulders.

By the time things had finished, Law and Hargreaves appear to have returned to their accommodation. But Slater for some reason elected to travel to Masca with the two men.

The landlady of the property the duo had rented there, for around 40 euros per night, said one of the men was in his 40s and the other was slightly younger.

Friends of Slater say they were black and hailed from Luton — details which could help investigators identify them should they feel the need. One apparently went by the nickname Johnny Vegas.

It’s unclear why they had chosen to stay in Masca, an hour from the festival venue, rather than one of the many hotels nearby.

At 7.30am, Slater posted to Snapchat a blurry picture of his right hand, holding a cigarette. The tiles in the background match those on the steps outside the front door of the small rental property. Half an hour later, the landlady spoke to him at a bus stop next door. And at about ten past eight, she saw him walking briskly up the steep road north of the village.

Lucy Mae Law has, meanwhile, said Slater telephoned her in a panic around 8.15am, saying he was lost and thirsty, had been cut by a ­cactus, and that his phone was running out of battery. The device went dead at 8.50am, and Slater hasn’t been seen since.

It has been widely speculated that he was attempting to walk home to his accommodation, a 25-mile trek. But you don’t have to spend long in Masca to realise that no one in their right mind would undertake such a journey, or choose to leave the road.

On Tuesday, I retraced his steps to the spot where Slater’s phone last transmitted, which is in scrubland a short walk from the Mirador La Cruz restaurant at the top of the pass into the next valley. The ­terrain is a mixture of steep hills, and near vertical cliffs, with a waist-high blanket of cacti and prickly shrubs covering the ground. It is, in short, virtually impossible to walk through.

Slater was also heading north of the village: or to put things another way, away from, rather than towards, the resort where his apartment was. And a bus, costing just one euro, was due to come in the right direction just over an hour after his phone went dead.

One possible explanation for his bizarre decision making is of course that he’d had a sleepless night fuelled by drink and drugs and was confused.

Another is that he was trying to escape from something, or someone. To that end it is interesting, and some might argue suspicious, that his two hosts cut short their stay in the village, which had been booked for seven days, returning to the UK shortly after being questioned by local police.

All sorts of wilder explanations are now doing the rounds, some better sourced than others. One posits that he became involved in a fight over a stolen Rolex watch. Another that he had ended up in debt to shadowy underworld figures. His somewhat unorthodox behaviour, in videos shot at the music event, has led some to ­wonder if he was selling drugs on the dancefloor.

Slater’s mother, Debbie Duncan, who is in Tenerife, has told reporters, meanwhile, that she received a message on Snapchat stating ‘Kiss goodbye to your boy, you’re never going to see him again, he owes me a lot of money.’ She has since told reporters she believes her son has been kidnapped, saying last week: ‘I think he’s been taken against his will with what’s been said, but it’s in the hands of the police. It’s just traumatic and it doesn’t feel real. It’s just awful, it’s horrendous.’

Why organised criminals based in Tenerife might want to

hold a 19-year-old apprentice bricklayer from Lancashire ­hostage is unclear.

However, Slater does have something of a colourful past. In 2017, he and a friend, James Currie — then aged 13 — appeared in the local newspaper after a curious incident in their hometown which saw them ambushed by a gang of three Asian men, who jumped out of a car and beat them up.

‘He was absolutely terrified when he came home,’ Debbie told reporters. ‘He was really shook up and had a massive lump on his head.’

And last August Slater was to be found at Preston Crown Court where he and seven other youths were found guilty of attacking a teenager with a machete, golf clubs and an axe at an abandoned paper mill in 2021.

Judge Philip Parry said they should be ‘thoroughly ashamed’ of their ‘disrespectful behaviour’ during proceedings, during which the gang laughed and giggled as prosecutors described how they had descended on their victim like a ‘pack of gorillas’.

The judge said the incident involved ‘intimidation of ­witnesses, supply of class A drugs, and street robbery’. However, the mention of drugs appears to have been a reference to two other defendants who were linked to a county-lines drug investigation. Friends of Slater, who got an 18-month community order, say the attack was in fact the result of an argument over a girl.

There is also speculation that Slater has in some way staged his own disappearance, perhaps to escape drug debts. This has been fuelled by the mayor of Santiago del Teide, the nearest major town to Masca, who on Tuesday ­suggested in an interview with Reuters that local police are ­investigating reports that he has been spotted watching the Euros football matches in a bar.

Last night the mayor rowed back on the claim, saying he had no first-hand knowledge of the ­sighting. However Slater’s father, Warren, believes his son could be a so-far unidentified individual seen walking into Santiago del Teide on the evening of his disappearance, and sitting on a bench next to the church. Although blurry CCTV footage is inconclusive, Warren has travelled to the town to distribute missing posters.

Yet more rumour surrounds the existence of an appeal on crowd-funding website GoFundMe, launched by Lucy Mae Law. It sought the strangely specific sum of £30,000 to ‘Bring Jay Home’.

The appeal, which is also endorsed by mum Debbie, has so far raised more than £36,000. It’s unclear why they might need that sort of cash, or how it would help to bring him home.

Law, who was speaking regularly to reporters in the immediate aftermath of his disappearance, has since gone to ground.

Stranger theories, suggesting the missing teenager might have been taken by wild animals, are also doing the rounds, with former British sports commentator and conspiracy theorist David Icke speculating, along with others, that he’s been people-­trafficked to nearby Morocco.

Like other more outlandish explanations, they are taking root for a simple reason: that nothing makes very much sense about Jay Slater’s disappearance from that drug-fuelled music festival. And the longer he remains ­missing, the darker the possible ­explanations become.