The Runaway Schoolgirl (3 page)

O
n Friday, 21 September 2012, less than 24 hours since I had packed Gemma off to Louise's for a sleepover, my whole world was turned upside down. And to think, I had started the day with nothing more to worry about than what kind of furniture we wanted to buy from Argos …

Detective Constable Pawson and the school police officer came into the sitting room, where the family had gathered waiting for news. Our minds had been racing, trying to make sense of things and wondering what had happened to Gemma. No one wanted to admit their fears.

When DC Pawson then said, ‘We know who she's with', I was chilled to the core.

The school police officer recapped the information that they had. Following DC Pawson's visit to us earlier in the week, he had been liaising with the school. The moment Gemma went
missing, he requested that a number of cross-checks be made on Forrest.

DC Pawson's suspicions about Forrest had proved to be correct: he and Gemma were together.

‘We have CCTV footage of Jeremy Forrest and Gemma boarding a ferry at 9.20pm last night from Dover to Calais. We tracked his car number plate from Eastbourne to the ferry crossing.'

I jumped up, screamed ‘Nooooo,' and ran out of the room. Once again I found myself thinking, ‘If I'm not there, it's not happening.' It can't be happening. I wanted to run, but I had nowhere to run to. My coping mechanism was to deny that my darling daughter could have been taken by this man. Things like this didn't happen to people like us.

Back in the sitting room with Paul, Max, Mum and Charlotte there was a whirlwind of questions. What was being done? When would they arrest him? When would Gemma be back? Did Gemma looked scared on the CCTV footage? Had he kidnapped her? Could he have molested her? Everyone wanted to speak; they wanted answers.

For me, it was just a blur. I went to the other side of the room trying to escape what I had just heard. Surely it is a mistake, I kept telling myself. Surely she will be home in a minute.

DC Pawson explained to us that Forrest had phoned in sick the day before. When the police report about Gemma going missing came through, he had called Forrest's home and spoken to his wife, who said he was away on a course in London. DC Pawson put two and two together – the rumours, the pictures, the pair of them going missing from school – and then it was just a matter of tracking down Forrest's car number plate.

By then, though, Forrest and Gemma had got a 15-hour head start on the police and were already over the border in France. The police said they were in contact with P&O Ferries and that officers were going to Dover to collect the CCTV images.

There was one glimmer of hope that we could all cling on to – Forrest had bought return tickets and they were due back in Dover on the 10pm ferry on Sunday night.

I tried to persuade myself that Gemma might ring me; after all, she would know how upset I would be that she had disappeared. I told myself maybe, just maybe, it was totally innocent, but deep down I knew I was kidding myself.

Paul was great and immediately took charge of the kids, making sure they were fed and tucked up in bed. Max was brilliant, too, doing everything he could. Everyone pulled together and tried to stay strong.

I didn't cry, and I didn't hassle the police to do more than they were doing already. I didn't feel any anger; in fact, I didn't feel any emotion at all – I was just numb. It was all too much for me to take in.

The sequence of events is a bit of a blur, but I do remember that at some stage a family liaison officer called Jim arrived. To start off with, he acted suspiciously with us, watching how we all interacted. I suppose he was trying to see if there was anything untoward going on. As we took calls from various family members and friends, he silently took it all in. It was a bit weird, but this was the least of my worries at the time.

I can't remember if I slept that night. From the moment I heard Gemma had gone missing, I stopped being myself. I felt like I was somehow on the outside, looking in, watching it all unfold. People were running around, fussing over me and the
kids, trying to comfort me, encouraging me to eat and so on, but I was just blank. I started obsessing over stupid things. Would she have eaten? What clothes had she got with her? Does he know she is afraid of the dark?

But as I was soon to discover, the nightmare was only just beginning …

O
n Saturday morning, Jim came back, and he was much more friendly this time than he had been the night before. In fact, over the course of the next few days we became like old friends. It is strange how quickly you bond with people in incredibly difficult circumstances.

The police issued us with a password, in case the press or anyone else got hold of the story and tried to get more information out of us over the phone. Bizarrely, our password was Wonga – apparently, it was the first thing Jim and his ‘guvnor’ had seen in the newspaper that morning. Soon after, I got a call from Detective Chief Inspector Jason Tingley but I refused to talk to him until I heard the magic password. I knew he was probably who he said he was, but I needed to make sure …

DCI Tingley, now armed with the right password, called us
back and later came over with a colleague, Detective Inspector Andy Harbour. They arrived at about 8pm and I sat in the kitchen with Paul, Max and my eldest sister Annette as the officers recounted what they knew. They explained that the CCTV images that P&O Ferries had provided were now with the police and a European arrest warrant was being prepared. Trouble was, it would need to be put before a senior judge in order for it to be authorised, and that couldn’t happen until Monday morning at the earliest. That meant that if Gemma and Forrest didn’t return on the Sunday night, they wouldn’t be able to arrest him in France until Monday at the earliest.

They also explained to me how MI5 and the Serious Organised Crime Unit were advising Sussex Police, and how Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organisation, would assist with the investigation, acting as a go-between for the police forces in the UK and Europe. To be honest, I don’t think I took it all in: all I wanted to know was how long it was going to take to bring my daughter back.

Annette and Max then started going on and on about the lack of support that the school had given us. It was then that I was broken out of my trance. I remember sitting there in utter disbelief at the conversation they were having.

Suddenly, I snapped. ‘Will you two shut up! I don’t care what your thoughts or views are, this is not helping. The only person I want to hear speak is Chief Inspector Tingley!’ Having a debate about it wasn’t going to get Gemma back.

At that point I didn’t care what the school did or didn’t do. I was just hanging on every word that Jason Tingley had to say. It wasn’t until the next day, when it actually dawned on me what I had done, that I apologised for my outburst. I was ashamed about how I had reacted.

Jason explained that if Gemma and Forrest arrived back on the 10pm ferry, the police would be waiting there to arrest him on suspicion of abduction. They could do this as soon as they were back in the UK, but they couldn’t do anything in France without the European arrest warrant. Once they had arrested Forrest, Gemma would then be taken into protective custody. She wouldn’t be under arrest herself, as she had done nothing wrong.

Until then, he said, we just had to be patient …

The next call I got was from the Sussex Police media department. With all the text messages and tweets that our family and friends had been putting out, our local newspaper, the
Eastbourne Herald,
had got hold of the story. To make matters worse, some other children at school had obviously put two and two together, and there were some Facebook messages going round, saying that Gemma had run off with Forrest.

The media department wanted to issue an official statement and take control of the situation. Max gave them a quote and, before we knew it, a story about Gemma appeared on the BBC News website …

Once the story was out there, it spread like wildfire. I was quite naïve when it came to social media; I had only ever used Facebook for sharing pictures with my friends and family and had never used Twitter before. Max was much more techie, however, and by Sunday morning social media was going crazy with the story. Paul worked out how to set up a Twitter account and Lee and Maddie kept us up to date with everything they saw on Facebook.

Someone put up a post saying that Gemma had been abducted and I remember feeling sick to my stomach. That word had never been used before and seeing it written down made the situation even more frightening.

At some point I remember Lee telling us he had found a song that Forrest had posted on his blog under the name Jeremy Ayre and that people on social media were saying he had written it for Gemma. Lee wanted us to listen to it, but I couldn’t face it. I just hoped that the press wouldn’t pick up on it and make a story out of it.

Max had been looking after Alfie, but Monday was going to be his first day at school, so he brought him back to the house in the afternoon. I was determined that Alfie wasn’t going to know what was happening. We told him that his big sister had gone to stay at her nan’s, which wasn’t unusual, as she often did.

Once I had tucked Alfie up in bed and settled Lilly, it was strange and eerily quiet in the house. Paul, Jim and I sat in the kitchen, drinking tea and watching the clock. Every so often, I would catch someone glancing up at the clock: we were all waiting for 10pm to come around.

It was the longest evening ever, but there really was nothing to do but wait. And wait. The clock was moving more slowly than ever. At one point, I even thought it was going backwards. It was unbearable.

Jim tried his best to keep our spirits up, reassuring us that the police would notify us the minute that the passenger lists had been checked on the ferry.

Ten pm came. No call. 10.05pm. No call. Then at 10.15pm, the phone rang. Jim walked into the hall and pulled the door behind him as Paul and I held each other and waited for him to come back in with good news.

A few minutes later, he walked back in, shaking his head: they weren’t on the ferry. They were missing. At that point I allowed myself to cry. I completely broke down and fell into
Paul’s arms, sobbing. My heart had literally been broken and every shred of emotion that I’d been holding back started flooding out.

I began blaming myself for everything that had happened. If only I’d listened to Gemma more … If only I hadn’t screamed and shouted at her because of that phone call from Forrest … If only I hadn’t said she could stay at Louise’s … It was all my fault. I have lived with that guilt ever since and I’ve had counselling to try and come to terms with it, but no amount of sessions will ever shed the guilt.

I was inconsolable. Paul and Jim tried to comfort me and insisted that I was not to blame in any shape or form, but it was all too much. I felt physically sick and sobbed my heart out. Then anger took over. I was filled with fury for that bastard. How dare Forrest do this to her? How could he ruin her life like this? What right did he have to take my daughter, to even be near her?

It was around this time that we discovered that the national papers were also interested in the story and had been trying to get more information out of Sussex Police. I was later to discover that the newspapers scour local websites for any stories that they can pick up on. In this case,
The Sun
was the first on the case.

We knew that the story was likely to be all over the papers the following day. My friend Chloe was due back from holiday in the early hours, so we sent her a text message asking her to pick up the first editions of all the newspapers at the airport when she arrived. My heart sank when she called me a few hours later: ‘You’re in all of the papers!’ I insisted she read out every single story that had been written about Gemma. She said it was bizarre standing in the middle of Gatwick, reading
out stories about a person she knew, but then nothing about this situation was exactly normal.

Each of the papers had put their own spin on the story, but basically they repeated what had been on the BBC News website. Luckily, the police hadn’t revealed that Forrest was a teacher at Gemma’s school, so that crucial piece of information was missing from those early stories.

By the time the later editions came out, though, they had unearthed more details. Suddenly we were faced with headlines such as MARRIED TEACHER ON RUN WITH PUPIL and YOU HIT ME LIKE HEROIN, which we later discovered was a line from the song that Forrest had apparently written for Gemma. There were pictures of Gemma in her school uniform, pictures of Forrest and his wife on their wedding day, pictures of the school …

My private life had suddenly become very public.