The Runaway Schoolgirl

by Davina Williams

  Missing schoolgirl XXXX XXXX thought to be in France The parents of a 15-year-old East Sussex girl who is believed to have gone to France with a man she knows have urged her to contact them.

  XXXX XXXX, from Eastbourne, was reported missing when she failed to turn up for school on Friday.

  Sussex Police said she was spotted later using a Dover to Calais ferry.

  Detectives named the man thought to be with XXXX as Jeremy Forrest, 30, from Ringmer, near Lewes, who was driving a Ford Fiesta, registration GJ08 RJO.

  The teenager’s father, XXXX, said: ‘We just want XXXX to make contact with us. We are worried and miss her terribly – please get in touch XXXX.’

  Det Insp Andy Harbour from Sussex Police said: ‘We do not believe XXXX to be at risk but we are appealing for her to make contact with her family, who are very worried and miss her.

  ‘We know that she crossed from Dover to Calais at around 21:20 BST [on Friday]. We believe she is still in France and we are in contact with the French authorities.’

  He urged anyone with information about her disappearance to contact the police.

  XXXX is said to be 5ft 6ins, slim and has long dark brown hair. She was last seen wearing a white vest top and a silver necklace.

  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.

  CHAPTER 7

  FAMILY TREE

  When Gemma was born, on 2 June 1997, I made a promise to her that I would always love her and would never let anything bad happen to her. I had separated from her biological father Gary while I was pregnant. I was twenty-two; Gary was twenty-five. I remember telling her that day that it wouldn’t matter that she didn’t have two parents because I would always protect and love her more than two people put together.

  Gary was my first love and our relationship was good to begin with. Shortly after we moved in together, I became pregnant with Lee and then three years later I discovered I was expecting again. At the time, Gary had a terrible temper and really scared me, so when I found out I was pregnant again, I decided to go it alone and bring up the children myself.

  I tried again and again to get Gary to have some kind of relationship with Lee and Gemma; I didn’t want them not to have a father in their lives. But it was to no avail – he didn’t even so much as hold Gemma until she was two weeks old and after that he only saw her a couple of times. He just didn’t want to know her and Lee.

  After that relationship, it wasn’t a priority to meet anyone else, but two years later I met Max, and it was love at first sight. He was amazing with the children and we got married in Gretna Green on 23 October 1999. The children took his name and we were all really happy together. I gave birth to Maddie in 2000 and then, eight years later, Alfie came along.

  Unfortunately, our relationship went downhill after Max was involved in a serious bike accident. He sustained terrible injuries to his back and had a year’s rehabilitation. He kept reliving the nightmare of the accident and it was just too much strain on our marriage. We were unable to get it back on track and we agreed to separate when Alfie was two years old, but promised to stay as amicable as possible for the children’s sakes. In fact we even spent a Christmas together as Max was determined to be a proper dad to the children. Later, Maddie moved in with him – she has always been Daddy’s girl – but we are still very close and she comes and stays with us all the time, so I don’t feel deta
ched from her.

  In 2010, I got promoted in my work as an auditor and it was there that I met Paul, who was a senior auditor. With four children already, I really had my hands full, but after much discussion we decided to try for a baby and were blessed with beautiful Lilly. Of course, the day she was born was the day that Miss Shackleton had called from Gemma’s school about the rumours. For me, the first few months of Lilly’s life were fairly dramatic, but through it all I was determined that Alfie and Lilly wouldn’t be dragged into the nightmare.

  I am extremely proud of the fact that we united as a family to keep Alfie and Lilly’s lives as normal as possible. But things were about to get much more challenging …

  CHAPTER 8

  NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL NEWS

  During the course of Sunday night and into Monday morning I could hear the rumble of vehicles starting to descend on the street. By the morning the road was full of cars and vans set up with satellite dishes. There were swarms of photographers with tripods and zoom lenses aimed at our house.

  My first priority was to get Alfie off for his first day of school. He didn’t have a clue what was going on as we bustled around, getting his lunch box ready. He had his little book bag and a brand new school coat, and was really excited. I felt tearful because it was the first time that I hadn’t been able to accompany one of my children on their first day at school, but Paul and I agreed that I should stay at home in case Gemma called. She didn’t have her mobile phone with her, but we knew that she would remember the landline number.

  There was an added complication: the phone account that we had at the house was in Max’s name and we were in the process of changing it to my name and getting a new number. This wouldn’t have mattered under normal circumstances, but it was meant to be changing that very day. I got in contact with the phone company, explained the situation and begged them not to change the number. Normally, it would have been too late, but luckily they were able to get engineers on the case and let us keep our original number.

  My two best friends, Chloe and Darcee, arrived at around 8am and couldn’t believe the crowd of reporters and TV crews that had gathered outside our house. They were shocked and frightened by the fact the story had escalated so quickly.

  We kept all the curtains drawn and the blinds closed so that nobody could see in. I crawled around upstairs on my hands and knees, and started sitting on the floor instead of the bed in case the people who had gathered outside could see anything through a gap in the curtains. I know it’s ridiculous, but I was becoming so paranoid that I started whispering to people, convinced the media gathered outside could somehow hear through the walls.

  We could see that reporters were going round all of our neighbours, trying to dig up information, and we had a stream of people shoving business cards and scribbled notes through our letterbox, asking to speak to us. Anyone who came to the door got a very direct ‘No comment’ from Paul. He was the designated ‘door opener’ and the press soon got used to his response of ‘No comment’ every time.

  At around 9am the post was delivered and there was a letter from Gemma’s school. It said that she had to attend extra compulsory tuition lessons in maths. I couldn’t believe what I was reading – not least because the maths teacher was Mr Forrest, the very same man who had just abducted my daughter and taken her to France! It was so shocking, it was almost laughable. What I said is unprintable, but you can probably guess the kind of thing …

  Chloe got straight on the phone to Mr Worship, the executive head of Kennedy High School; I was in too much of a rage to speak to him myself. There was an awkward silence, after which he apologised profusely and said that there must have been an oversight. The letter had been sent out on the Friday night and should have been intercepted, he explained, but it had slipped through the net.

  It felt like such a smack in the face. Not only had the school had the cheek to get in touch about something so trivial at a time like this, it was about her abductor’s specialist subject! I needed a lot of strong coffee to calm me down after that.

  Next, a lady called Hannah called me and introduced herself as my new family liaison officer. It transpired that Jim had just been on duty over the weekend, although he was to help us again. Hannah explained that the Sussex Police media team wanted to set up a press conference with me and Max. She told me a bit about what would be involved and instructed me to be ready to be picked up at midday.

  I was terrified. I hate being in the spotlight – I didn’t even like walking down the aisle at my own wedding – and the idea of everyone looking at me and having cameras in my face scared the hell out of me. The fact that it was because my darling daughter had gone missing only made it worse: it was almost too much to bear.

  Hannah informed me that the press conference would be covered by all the major national networks, including the BBC, ITN and Sky, and that there would also be a French translator present so that the story could be broadcast in France, too.

  As much as the idea of the press conference filled me with horror, I knew how important it was to get the message out about Gemma. No matter what, I had to go through with it. I had been living in baggy pregnancy clothes since Lilly was born and hadn’t give a second thought to what kind of state my hair or clothes were in. My image was the least of my worries, but Chloe and Darcee were brilliant and helped me to look as presentable as I could under the circumstances.

  At midday, Hannah arrived. Chloe, Darcee and I stepped out of the house with our heads ducked down and headed for the waiting unmarked police car. We had agreed that Paul would stay at home to man the phones in case Gemma saw the press conference and got in touch.

  At this point, the reporters didn’t know what I looked like, so I hoped that having my friends with me might mean they wouldn’t single me out. I couldn’t believe the deafening noise when I walked out into the street. There was an immediate click-click-click-click-click as the photographers craned to get pictures and there were people shouting out questions from every direction. ‘Can you tell us any more?’ ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘Are there any more details you can share with us?’ ‘Has she been in touch?’

  It was so scary. Every time I tried to look up and see what was going on, everything went white as the flashbulbs blinded me.

  During the 20-minute journey, Hannah tried to keep the conversation light, explaining who she was and how I could contact her at any time after the press conference had taken place. She was clearly trying to calm my nerves, but there was nothing anybody could say or do to stop me feeling scared.

  When we arrived at Sussex Police HQ, there were more reporters and cameras waiting for us outside, so we went in through the back and walked through a maze of corridors to reach the conference area.

  DCI Jason Tingley came in and explained what was going to happen that afternoon. I remember asking him if he had ever done anything like this before, and was relieved when he said he hadn’t. It made me feel a bit less anxious to think that we were both going through it for the first time. He kept disappearing and I later discovered that, like me, he was petrified and had to keep visiting the bathroom whenever anyone mentioned the words ‘TV cameras’.

  Nick Cloke, the media team’s head of communications strategy, introduced me to Neil Honour, the chief superintendent of Sussex Police. Normally, I would have been in awe of meeting someone of his standing, but it didn’t feel significant at the time. It was more about finding out what each of these people were doing to help me find my daughter. I was reassured that so much was being done and I was incredibly grateful.

  By this time Max had arrived and we were asked to each prepare a script to read out to the press. Nick explained that this was in case we went blank when it came to the time for each of us to speak.

  How on earth could I convey how I felt? I thought about other police conferences where parents had put out pleas for lost children that I had seen on television. I knew how important it was to make the most of every second I was allowed to spea
k and to say something that would reach out to Gemma if she saw the message.

  Before we knew it, it was time to go in and face the press. I remember looking at Max’s face and he was as white as a sheet. We gave each other a reassuring smile and then went in.

  Once again, there was that click-click-click-click-click of cameras going off all around us and a blinding of white flashbulbs. I started shaking like a leaf; I couldn’t control myself. I took my seat and sat on my hands, desperate to stop the shaking. I knew how important this opportunity was. I told myself that it didn’t matter how I was feeling, it was all about getting Gemma back. Nothing else mattered.

  I was sitting at one end of a long table. Max was next to me, followed by Jason Tingley and then the French translator. Jason kicked off proceedings by reading out a press statement and explained the situation with the French authorities and what was happening with the European arrest warrant – basically, that everything was being put in place to get Gemma back as soon as possible.

  Then it was time for me to read out my statement. As Nick Cloke had warned, my mind did go blank, so I was glad of my piece of paper with the words I wanted to say to Gemma.

  This is what I said:

  Sweetheart, I don’t care what you have done or why. You can tell I’m in pieces and I just want you home. Your brother is absolutely devastated. Lee is beside himself and wants you back; Alfie keeps asking where you are; Maddie is walking around in a daze. She won’t leave my side and keeps asking when are you going to come home. And from me to you, sweetheart, you know that your adorable princess wants her adorable mermaid back. So please, darling, do anything. Text me, ring me, send me a message on Facebook, just do anything. The phone number at home hasn’t changed, so just ring me, please, sweetheart.