At 10.05pm on the night of 29 October last year, a CCTV camera in The Old Irish Pub on Barcelona’s La Rambla caught a fleeting glimpse of a figure walking out of the pub at a measured clip and on to the crowded pavement of the city’s nightlife thoroughfare. 

Dressed in a white T-shirt, black trousers and trainers, and carrying a small black rucksack, Levi Davis, then 24, a professional rugby player and sometime reality TV contestant, had arrived in the city that day, having taken the ferry from Ibiza. He had spent the evening at the Irish pub, watching a football match on television and drinking a pint of Heineken lager.

Stopping outside, Davis was seen tapping into his phone before striding off. Some 10 minutes later he was glimpsed outside the Hard Rock Cafe, at the other end of La Rambla.

And then he vanished.

Davis had gone to Ibiza, as he told friends, ‘to chill’, following a series of setbacks in his rugby career. He had been on the island for eight days, staying with a friend, when on 25 October he posted a strange message on Instagram. Staring into the camera, looking nervous, he began, ‘Hello, my name is Levi Davis and my life is in danger… I ask, no I beg, that you listen and try to understand what I am telling you.’

Over the next 15 minutes he unfolded a rambling story about how, following his appearance on The X Factor: Celebrity in 2019 as part of the group Try Star, with fellow rugby players Ben Foden and Thom Evans, he had met ‘many new people, one of which… we began a friendship formed through music’.