As 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.