The Runaway Schoolgirl by Davina Williams Read Free Book Online

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