The Runaway Schoolgirl

by Davina Williams

  CHAPTER 10

  ‘TELL ME THE TRUTH’

  Paul 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 t
hat 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.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE WAITING GAME CONTINUES

  Sure enough, around 7am the following morning, the newspaper reporters and television cameras returned and took up their pitches outside the house. It seemed strange how quickly we had fallen into a pattern of living – another day camped out on the street for the press pack, another day of waiting in the kitchen of our blacked-out house for us.

  As usual, the post arrived early. To add to all of the madness in the street, we started receiving letters from complete strangers. They would have the words ‘To the parents of Gemma Grant, Eastbourne’ on the front of them and yet, unbelievably, they still somehow got to us, like those letters addressed to ‘Father Christmas, Lapland’ you hear about.

  I received some saying ‘God will protect your daughter, God will keep her safe’. I’m not a religious person, but I didn’t mind well-wishers saying things like that. It was comforting to know that Gemma’s story had touched them enough for them to take the time to write to us.

  But not all the letters were positive. Some, frankly, were just plain disturbing. One in particular I remember was from a retired schoolteacher, who wrote: ‘You need to let your daughter be with this man. She loves him and you should let the relationship continue.’ He said it wasn’t important what I believed and that Gemma was entitled to do what she wanted.

  I couldn’t believe how some people felt they were entitled to wade in with opinions on good parenting. I received letters, some from other parents of teenage children who should know better, saying, ‘She’s nearly sixteen, she’s free to do what she wants’. To read stuff like this was so upsetting. How could these people not understand that this was abuse, not romance? Gemma had only turned fifteen in June, so presumably the ‘relationship’ had started when she was still fourteen.

  Gemma was my little girl; Jeremy Forrest was a predatory monster.

  Being a small neighbourhood, I knew the postman, and he would look a bit sheepish when he knocked on the door with armfuls of mail. He was very respectful, though, and even months later would ask us if we were OK and tell us if reporters were still hanging around. It was incredible, the amount of support we got from the most unlikely people.

  Darcee arrived quite early and helped me get through all the ‘normal’ things – getting Lilly settled, getting Alfie off to school, and so on – and tried to make me eat something. I’d been surviving on coffee for the past few days; I just wasn’t interested in food. Over the course of that week, I lost a stone, but I can assure you that it is not a diet I would recommend.

  One of the first phone calls I received that day was from the Sussex Police media team, telling me that the BBC1 programme Crimewatch was planning to run a report on Gemma that night and asking me if I would be prepared to appear on it. As before, my immediate reaction was: ‘Will it help bring back my daughter?’ The police media team were very honest with me. They said it wouldn’t necessarily make a difference, and there was already much going on in France which the press didn’t know about, but equally it wouldn’t do any harm either. I didn’t like the idea of leaving the house for the day – Gemma could call at any time, after all, and I had the other children to consider – so it was agreed that Max would do it instead.

  Darcee and I spent the remainder of the day waiting for news. At that stage, I felt as if everything was out of my control and that I had pretty much done all that I could. I logged on to Facebook and tried to catch up with everything that was happening on social media. There were lots of messages from well-wishers and an old school friend of Gemma’s had set up a Facebook support group. She became my eyes and ears as to what was happening on social media and was good at warning me if someone was being more interested in the case than they should be – she could spot disturbed people very quickly!

  The press, meanwhile, had found more songs online that Forrest had written for Gemma. They also started to piece together Twitter conversations that Gemma and Forrest had shared and random comments that she had posted on Facebook. If there was anything to be dug up, it seemed the newspapers managed to find it.

  At 3pm that day, Forrest’s parents, Jim and Julie, appeared at a press conference at Lewes police station. I only got to see it much later in the day and, to be honest, I wasn’t all that interested in what they had to say; I was more interested in what they looked like and whether they seemed like good people. I could instantly see the pain on their faces. I could see his mother’s fear, the worry, the strain and devastation. I could hear his father’s voice shaking as he tried to hold it together. I walked away from the TV with a very saddened heart. What a mess …

  Following Mark Ling’s conversations the day before, his colleague, Neil Ralph, called to ask if I would send Louise a text to see if I could get her to open up to me about Gemma. I realised it was a very scary thing for her to be going through, but at this stage it was crucial that she told me the truth.

  This is what I wrote to Louise:

  Hi honey, it’s Gem’s mum. Sweetheart, first of all I just wanted to check you’re OK? It’s been horrible not to have seen you since this started as I’m guessing you’re so upset. It’s been like living out a nightmare here. Lee keeps crying, Maddie is beside herself and Alfie keeps asking where she is. As for Lilly, we say a little prayer every night for her ‘adorable mermaid’ to come home. Paul and I are a mess and keep asking ourselves why we didn’t spot the fact she would leave us. As for me, I can’t sleep, can’t eat and I’m so so worried that she’s dead. I can’t stop crying and I haven’t left the house in case she calls me. I’ve managed to keep the home number the same as I know she’ll know it. I had to do that press conference and it was the worst thing I’ve ever done. I got outside and collapsed on the floor and sobbed my heart out. If she doesn’t want to come
home, that has to be her choice. I just need to know that she is safe, well and alive. Sending lots of love and hugs and you know where we are if you want to talk.

  Her reply didn’t contain any useful information. All she said was: ‘Hi, I’m okay, just praying for Gem’s safe return. Thinking of you all. Love Louise.’

  I later found out that the reply had been scripted by Louise’s mother. I wasn’t surprised, as I imagine she may have thought Louise was an ‘accessory to the crime’ or something like that. Although I understood why she replied that way, it was so frustrating.

  Nothing really seemed to be moving forward. I wondered how much more of it I could take.

  We watched Crimewatch later that evening and Max came over extremely well on the programme. I was really proud of him and I remember thinking what a shame it was that he was referred to as Gemma’s stepfather. Max had always been a wonderful father to Gemma and brought her up as if she was his own, and I felt really sorry for him in that respect. He’d been more of a father to her than her biological dad ever had.

  The next day, Friday, 28 September, began in much the same way as the one before. Chloe came over and helped me with the morning routine as the media once again descended on the street and took up their positions outside our house.

  As usual, Paul was at his sentry post at the front door, ready to face the barrage of reporters asking for more information. Chloe and I were talking in the kitchen when I realised he was having a much longer conversation than usual with one of the reporters. He came into the kitchen and told us that a journalist from the Daily Mail had come up with an idea that he thought we should consider – writing a letter to Gemma that they would publish in the newspaper.