The Runaway Schoolgirl (5 page)

What Mr Worship then said to me wound me up even more. He told me that he had been at his desk all weekend and made a special point of telling me that he’d given up his weekend and his family time to be there – as if I should be grateful after all the hell that his school had put me through!

But I needed answers; I also needed practical advice about what to do. So far, all I’d got from the school was a head teacher who had generously given up his weekend to wait for news! I couldn’t have been angrier.

After that, the phone never seemed to stop ringing. Next, I got a call and a visit from Mark Ling, the chief inspector for child protection, who wanted to conduct another search through Gemma’s room to see if there was any evidence that they had missed previously.

Then Mum called to say a family friend had volunteered to create a website dedicated to finding Gemma. Over the course of the next few days, it proved to be incredibly useful. Unfortunately, though, other bogus ‘Find Gemma’ sites started cropping up, with pictures taken from her Facebook and Twitter accounts, and there were all sorts of sick people pretending to be her. With each day that passed, I became increasingly disturbed by the way that some people could behave.

Lee was particularly furious about the stuff that people were writing on social media sites and took it really badly. I kept trying to reassure him that it didn’t matter what they were saying, that we knew the real Gemma and that everything was being done to get his sister back.

Finally, on Monday evening, when the police had finished searching Gemma’s room again and my two youngest were in bed, we sat down to watch all of the news programmes that we had recorded on Sky+. It was punishing to see the same report over and over again, my darling daughter’s face taking over the whole of the screen. We sat up until the early hours watching different channels’ coverage of the same footage, hoping against hope that there would be some breaking news or the phone might ring and it would be Gemma, saying she was coming home.

A
s Monday had been such a full-on and emotional day, with so many significant things happening, I decided to ban everyone from coming round on Tuesday – even my best friends: I wanted to concentrate on Paul and the kids. The two little ones were too small to know what was going on, but I could sense uneasiness. Paul was finding it a strain and Lee and Maddie were very unsettled about all the rubbish on social media.

We needed some time to regroup as a family. I felt ashamed about my outburst on Sunday when I lost my temper with Annette and Max – it just didn’t feel like me – and I felt that I needed to get myself back on track and focus on staying positive.

I banned everyone from using the landline, so that it would be clear for Gemma if she were to ring, and I had my mobile
phone practically super-glued to my side in case there was any news from the police.

My neighbours were all completely fantastic while the madness was going on outside my front door. They spoke to reporters, but nobody said anything derogatory or tried to stitch us up; everyone was so respectful. I felt so terrible that they were trapped in their homes while the press took over the street, but they were all very patient about it.

My next-door neighbour Katrina was an absolute star. As it was so difficult for us to leave the house, she started handing food parcels over the garden fence. She made sure we had enough food in for the kids and plenty of milk for all of those endless cups of tea and coffee that we were going through. I don’t know how I would have managed without her.

Tuesday was spent trying to do ordinary family things, the things I felt that I had neglected for the past few days. Paul had taken over feeding and changing Lilly, so I made a special point of taking back the reins as far as being the mum was concerned. I needed to let my children know I was still there for them and give them as much reassurance as I could that everything would be alright. I also needed the time to find the energy for whatever was to happen next.

Hannah called me with the great news that the European arrest warrant had been issued and let me know that there had been a fantastic response to the press conference. The police were busy sifting through leads, Detective Inspector Andy Harbour was on his way to the incident room that had been set up in Paris, and officers were on standby to collect Gemma and bring her back to the UK when she was found.

I sent Andy Harbour a text message to wish him good luck and thanked him for everything he was doing. His reply
read: ‘I promise I will do everything to bring her back’. It brought tears to my eyes. I was overwhelmed by the care we were getting. My world was in his hands and I knew I could completely trust him.

Later that day, Hannah came over with the CCTV images that were going to be released to the media. They showed Gemma hand in hand with Forrest. She was wearing her school uniform but had swapped her school polo top for a vest top. ‘At least she looks OK,’ I remember thinking. ‘She doesn’t look frightened, she looks quite relaxed – oh, and she’s wearing my cardigan!’ I felt so relieved to see a picture of her, but the sight of her hand in hand with her teacher was another thing altogether. I didn’t want to think about it too much, I couldn’t go there.

I kept staring at the picture. All the while I kept thinking, how could I have missed this? I remembered conversations, days when she had gone out, and I wondered if there had been any times she had given me hints that something else was going on.

In contrast to the day before, Tuesday was quite a calm day for all of us. Alfie went off to school as normal, but I could see that he was a bit confused about all the people outside and the fact we were still living in the dark inside the house.

One time, when Alfie asked why there were so many people outside, Max told him that the next-door neighbours were having a party. Alfie believed him, but he was very disappointed that he hadn’t been invited! On the two occasions when he saw police officers in the house, they were in plain clothes, so Paul and I told him they were from Argos and had come round to find out if he had been good enough for the Spiderman helicopter that he wanted. It’s amazing how creative you can become in a crisis.

Later that day, an intelligence officer came over to fit a tracking device to our phone and we told Alfie he was mending it. The whole thing was such a strange situation – like I was in an episode of
24
or something. I just couldn’t take the information in. The poor officer kept demonstrating what to do, if and when Gemma was to call, but I was all fingers and thumbs.

Hannah called again and asked me to check which clothes Gemma might have taken so that they could be matched up with the sightings that were coming through. She explained that the officers had taken what they thought was significant – scribbles on paper, her diary, her old mobile phone – but she said I might also be able to find things that the police had overlooked.

I was completely freaked out at the prospect of going back into her bedroom. When I’d been in the room on Friday, it was before the nightmare had really started, and I hadn’t been back in there since. At that point, I thought she was just absent from school, not officially missing. Now, of course, things were much more serious. I remember standing outside her bedroom door and being frozen to the spot. I told myself I had to do this and I put my hand on the door lever, pushing it down as if it was a 10-ton weight. My subconscious had taken over and I’d lost all strength in my body. Once again, it was like being on the outside, watching myself going through the motions.

When I eventually got in the room, I was shocked back to life when I discovered that the police had tidied up. Almost unrecognisable, in a way, it didn’t feel like her room at all. It helped, though, because it switched me back to reality and the task in hand.

Gemma had a big plastic storage tub under her bed and I went through it. There were the things I expected, like magazines and posters and the various autographs she had collected but I also came across a ripped-up ‘Boyfriend’ birthday card and some CDs that didn’t seem to be hers; they weren’t the kind of bands she would usually like. I also found some verses written down which looked like song lyrics. There was one sheet with two people’s handwriting on it – hers and someone else’s. They had obviously written a song together. I could only guess who the other writing belonged to …

Although I had tried to use the day to just be with Paul and the children, Mum was so distraught about what was going on that I was happy for her to come over that evening with my sister Charlotte. Mum and Gemma had always been close and she really wasn’t coping well. I tried to reassure her that the police were doing everything in their power to get Gemma back. In a way, I gave her the kind of debriefing that the police had been giving me.

Once they had left, and Alfie and Lilly were in bed, Paul and I lay on the sofa together with our laptop and tried to make sense of it all. Social media was going crazy and there seemed to be all sorts of information out there that I had no idea about. Gemma not only posted on Facebook and Twitter, but she also had Tumblr and Instagram accounts, and it was like a feeding frenzy on social media. The press, internet trolls and just about anyone we could think of seemed to have raked through Gemma’s files and reproduced her pictures. The comments on the various posts that were appearing were horrific – and extremely personal.

I felt terrible that I hadn’t done more to protect her privacy. I’d always believed that I had been a good mum in that way –
whenever there was anything on TV about eating disorders, internet grooming and any other issues that particularly affected teenagers, I practically forced my children to watch them so that they would be savvy about what they revealed online.

There was once a documentary on television about a man who had pretended to be a young girl online in order to meet other young girls. I wanted my children to understand that unless you physically know the person you are in touch with on social media, then they are not your friend. I used to make them all tell me who each of their friends on Facebook were and explain to me how they knew that person, and I gave them a limit for how much time they could spend on the computer each day. I also put firewalls and parental controls on devices, but obviously this hadn’t been enough.

On occasion, I had even done random searches through their phones for pictures and messages, but clearly I hadn’t been as vigilant as I had needed to be. I blamed myself and couldn’t believe how naïve I’d been to think I could control what was out there.

I now know that social media is virtually impossible to control. It was like wildfire. I couldn’t believe how many friend requests I had on Facebook. People I hadn’t heard from for years were coming out of the woodwork to re-connect with me, not to mention all the strangers who wanted to know me all of a sudden.

I have always been very wary of strangers around my children. When I first got together with Max, and then later with Paul, I was very mindful about how they interacted with my children. Changing nappies and bathing has always been my domain, and when it came to cuddling I watched them like a hawk until I was completely convinced I could
trust them. I know I’m probably overly cautious, but I have subsequently discussed it with them both and they said they wouldn’t expect me to behave any differently anyway.

It was at this point, when all these outsiders suddenly wanted to be friends, that I had a real crisis of trust. It seemed my family was fair game for anyone to comment on, write about and exploit.

Someone had seen a bucket list that Gemma had created on Tumblr, another social media site that I previously knew nothing about. The list included all the things that you would expect a teenager to want to do – learn to drive, go to Glastonbury, visit Niagara Falls, go in a hot air balloon, etc. – but there were also other items that she had already crossed out. She had fulfilled her ‘Go to Hollywood’ dream during the half-term school trip to America, where she was seen holding hands with Forrest, but there were other items she had crossed out that the press were to pick up on: ‘Number 7: Have someone write a song about me’ and ‘Number 50: Fall in love’. Before Gemma had disappeared I’d never known her to be in love before.

What was crazy was that all of this information was just out there online, and we hadn’t needed to do much digging around to find it. Throughout the whole process, I used to get Paul to buy all of the papers, but I hadn’t been able to face reading them. All of the new information I was getting was online.

Then there was yet another revelation to prepare for – the press had found out that Max wasn’t Gemma’s biological father. Although I told my family about not talking to the press, my sister Macy had been interviewed by a reporter and, because she wasn’t used to the way the press were able to
wheedle information out, had inadvertently spilled the beans on a few things. When the reporter asked, ‘Gemma’s real dad is Max, isn’t he?’ She said ‘Oh no, that’s not Max, his name is Gary Walker.’ Yet more headline fodder.

I felt upset and betrayed, and it all added to the feeling I had that I couldn’t trust anyone. The fact that people seemed to be finding out things before I knew about them made me feel even less of a parent than I already did.

P
aul and I didn't go to bed that night. We just stayed on the sofa, looking at social media, hardly believing the depths that some people could sink to. There was even a website of jokes dedicated to Gemma and Forrest. How could people be so sick?

I knew we shouldn't keep reading, but it was like a drug. I had given birth to Gemma, my beautiful mermaid, but all these people were trying to own a piece of her, like tragedy vampires.

I remember standing in the shower at 3am on Wednesday morning in a total daze. Convinced she was dead, I cried and cried and cried. It was so black outside and so bleak inside the house, everything seemed to be against us. I was in the depths of my despair, I honestly didn't think I could ever feel worse; there was nowhere further to fall.

Chloe came round early on Wednesday morning and asked me what kind of night I'd had. I told her that I had a terrible feeling that Gemma was dead and she insisted straight away that I ask the police directly, in case it turned out that they were withholding information from me for some reason. If she was dead, then maybe they weren't saying anything so they had more chance of catching Forrest. And if he was a murderer, he would definitely be on the run.

I'd been looking at a picture of Forrest and trying to ‘read' his face and find out what kind of person he was. To me, he was nothing to look at, not handsome in the slightest – if anything, I thought he was a bit strange-looking. But at that moment in time, I hoped and prayed that deep down he loved Gemma. That way, he would never physically harm her.

I still wouldn't allow myself to think about the two of them sexually. He was her teacher, she was a schoolgirl and half his age. It was almost as if by blocking out these thoughts I could stop them from happening. Obviously this wasn't the case – I couldn't prevent something happening by just avoiding it – but at the time I had to do whatever worked for me. I was in denial, but the alternative was just too much to bear.

I'd been shocked to find the torn-up ‘Boyfriend' birthday card among Gemma's things. When I told Charlotte about it, her face dropped. ‘Oh my God! During the summer, Gemma mentioned she had a boyfriend called Jeremy …' She had forgotten his name at the time and later, when she asked Gemma again if she had a boyfriend, she'd just laughed it off, saying, ‘No, I'm not interested. Mum has put me off!'

Some people have asked me if I was ever tempted to contact Forrest's parents or his wife, but I just didn't want to be involved with them. One of the police officers told me that his
parents had sent a message to say they were thinking of me and would do anything to help. Although genuinely touched by their concern, I didn't feel it would help the situation to contact them.

Later that morning Chief Inspector Mark Ling and his colleague, Detective Inspector Neil Ralph, came to the house to update me on how things were progressing. As soon as they walked through the door, Chloe made me ask them if Gemma was dead. I didn't want to hear the answer, but I had to know whether, in their hearts, their investigations to find her were in vain.

Without any hesitation, Mark Ling said that he truly believed Gemma was still alive and went on to tell me about a number of unconfirmed sightings that had been reported. There was nothing concrete at that stage, but officers were working round the clock.

He also explained how a detailed chain of command had been set up. There were three stages – bronze, silver and gold – to process evidence as it came through. Our conversation made me feel a lot more confident that the police were doing absolutely everything they possibly could do to find Gemma.

At some stage one of the newspapers put out a stupid story claiming that the French authorities weren't cooperating with the investigation. That couldn't have been further from the truth: the police had been in touch with the police forces in France, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain and even further afield, so there was a whole network of support for us. We were so angry that this spurious story could jeopardise the investigations and the goodwill that had been developing. The paper was ordered to print an apology and luckily no damage was done.

Following our press conference, Mark Ling told us that Forrest's parents had agreed to do their own press appeal on Thursday, as it might help the investigation. Apparently, Forrest's father had said that he was concerned about his son's state of mind, but that statement had been retracted. Mark Ling felt the need to tell me this as he didn't want me to subsequently hear about it and worry.

I was later to discover that Forrest allegedly had mental health issues. Even now I can't bear to think about what they could have been, or what the implications might have been for Gemma if the pressure had all become too much for him while they were in France. What if he had lost his mind and hurt her?

As well as being in touch with Forrest's parents, the police had spoken to his wife Emily about the situation before he disappeared. She had told them that they had been having some marital difficulties, but that they had been out to dinner on the previous Wednesday night and had agreed to work through their problems. When he disappeared, she said it had hit her like a brick wall.

The police had traced Forrest's bank details and could see that he had taken out a large sum of cash before he and Gemma left the country. They didn't tell me exactly how much, but they had worked out how long it would last if they were frugal and eked the money out. The police were hoping Forrest would eventually use one of his bank cards because then it would instantly be traced, but he would most likely have known this, hence him taking out a wad of cash before they fled.

Everyone seemed to be offering the police as much help as they could. The only person who was hindering the investigation
was Gemma's friend Louise. She had been questioned on a number of occasions, but had given different accounts about what had happened.

I felt a little sorry for Louise. Obviously caught between a rock and a hard place, she was trying to stand by her best friend and was scared to be facing the police. Meanwhile, her stories were getting more and more convoluted. I was told that further measures might have to be taken if she continued to refuse to cooperate with the police, as she was holding up the investigation, and I promised that I would contact her the next day.

At the end of Mark Ling's visit, I truly felt that everything that could be done was being done. Even so, I wanted to be in France, looking for Gemma myself. I turned around to Chloe and said: ‘I need to do something, I need to go out there and look for her. I can't keep sitting here feeling like I'm doing nothing.'

Without missing a beat, she said: ‘Fine, there's nothing stopping you. We can get on the Eurostar and be in France in a couple of hours. Then what are you going to do? Do you know how big France is? What if they aren't even in France now? What happens if she calls? What then?'

I felt useless at home just waiting, but Chloe stopped me in my tracks and made me think again. ‘Everything that can be done is being done,' she said. ‘You have everyone working twenty-four hours, looking for her. You need to be here for when she calls. You're providing the police with every single piece of information you know. What more can you do? Think about it seriously for a moment. What your family really needs is to have you here. You need to be here for when Gemma comes back.'

And I realised that Chloe was right. I knew I needed to stay at home, but I wanted to be sure I hadn't missed anything with so much going on. I knew the police might call, asking for more information or for me to go somewhere at any point, and I couldn't do that if I was in France. More importantly, Gemma might phone and there was no way I would want to miss that.

That evening, Max called me and told me that he had also been thinking about going to France. A TV company had been in touch with him and wanted to take a film crew to France and start their own investigation. I could understand why he wanted to get involved, but I told him that he shouldn't, as there was more going on than I could tell him about at the moment.

At that stage I couldn't tell him about the unconfirmed sightings, or the chain of command that had been put in place and the fact that Forrest's bank account was being monitored. The police didn't want full disclosure of how Gemma and Forrest were being tracked down. They had told me because I was the parent with responsibility, but I had to keep that information to myself. I promised Max that I would tell him as soon as I possibly could. He was disappointed, but he understood that I had my reasons.

By 10pm, the phone calls seemed to stop for the night. The reporters outside had gone home and Paul and I were able to sit together and talk through the day's events once again.

That night, the television presenter Anne Diamond appeared on
Sky News
as part of a panel of guests previewing the following day's newspapers. I couldn't believe it when she described the story as ‘a bit so-whatish'. The fact that Gemma was fifteen and Forrest was ‘twenty-something' – even though
he was actually thirty – wasn't, she said, a ‘sickeningly huge age gap'.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. She said that he must be tracked down and brought to book for the offence, but she was talking about it as if it wasn't a big deal. She seemed unable to see that she was actually talking about child abuse. We were absolutely seething.

One thing that did lighten the day was that the daughter of one of our neighbours, who we barely knew, had been interviewed in the
Daily Mail.
In the piece, she claimed to be a ‘close friend' of Gemma's, although as far as we knew they had never hung out together or socialised at all. However, she very kindly said that it was completely unlike Gemma to run away and we were all in shock, and that we were a very nice family – which was nice! It was just another example of the crazy ‘extra' things that we had to deal with while this whole situation was going on.

We then watched TV into the night to see what news had come out that day. I dreaded turning it off, for it all to go eerily quiet. For me, when the noise stopped, the searching stopped. I didn't think about the fact that it was a 24-hour operation for the police. I lived for the morning to arrive when everything felt like it started up again, when I knew that people were still searching, still getting the message out that my daughter was missing.