Bit by bit, the police were piecing together what had happened when Gemma went missing, and we began to get a sense of just how chillingly calculating Forrest had been when he abducted her.
On the day that Gemma had told Louise that she wasn’t feeling well and that she was going to go back home, she had instead gone to a shopping centre car park, where Forrest was waiting for her.
Gemma had left her wash bag at Louise’s. Apparently, when they went back to pick it up, Forrest was in tears and cried to Louise, ‘I’m sorry I’m doing this, but I have to.’ It was if he was trying to manipulate Louise into thinking he was making some sort of grand gesture by running away with Gemma and wanted the poor girl to feel sorry for him. I expect he thought the fact that a teacher was trusting her with private information would make her more likely to keep the secret. He was a grown-up, after all, and Louise would have liked the fact he was confiding in her.
The first Gemma knew that they were going to France was when they were in the car on the way to Dover to catch the ferry. It was at this point that she first began to realise the magnitude of what she was doing. She had wanted to run away from home because she knew that she was going to be in trouble for lying about what had been going on with Forrest, but she had never factored in a trip abroad; she had just assumed they would go to Scotland or somewhere up north. She didn’t speak to Forrest for the rest of the journey. She was scared, but felt it was too late to go back.
Before the ferry crossing, Forrest got Gemma to send a text to her friend Ben, telling him that they were heading north. Again, I think he thought Ben would be thrilled to be included in their circle of trust, but he also wanted to make sure that he had left a false trail in case Ben later said anything to the police. He had it all sussed out.
He later chucked his phone in the sea and, knowing the police would likely be on their tail, dumped his car soon after driving to Paris – he knew they were in danger of being tracked through the toll roads. From Paris, they then caught a train to Bordeaux.
It was so disturbing to discover how much Forrest had planned before the trip. He even told Gemma that he had researched what his prison sentence could be for taking her. It made me feel sick. In France, the legal age of consent is fifteen – provided, that is, the adult isn’t in a position of responsibility, which of course he was.
Forrest wanted to blend in as Gemma’s boyfriend rather than her teacher, to lay low in France until her sixteenth birthday and then resume their relationship back in the UK afterwards. Just because he was in France, though, didn’t mean he was invisible.
It transpired that he had created a fake CV using the name Jack Dean and had applied for a job working in a bar in Bordeaux. The manageress of the bar was British and had read about Gemma’s case online. She realised who Forrest was and, liaising with police, invited him back for a second interview.
He and Gemma were intercepted by plain-clothed policemen while on their way back to the bar. It was there that Gemma thought she was being kidnapped and so she started screaming and trying to claw free to get away. It wasn’t until Detective Inspector Andy Harbour called out to Gemma and started speaking to her in English that she started to calm down.
Alison, the woman who blew the whistle on them in Bordeaux, was interviewed after their discovery. ‘They seemed really nice and she seemed normal, no sign of distress, but I don’t feel their plan was thought through well enough,’ she said. ‘We might live in France, but we do follow what happens in our own country. As soon as I logged on to the internet, I recognised their photos.’