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we said he could watch a movie before he went to bed as a treat. We told him that we had turned the house into a special cinema and that was why all the curtains were drawn and the blinds were down.
    To this day, Alfie and Lilly have no idea about anything that has happened, and it is something I am extremely proud of.
    As we were enjoying family time with Alfie, the phone rang. It was Mr Worship, from Gemma’s school. This was the first contact that I’d had with the school for days, apart from a rather random call from someone called Mr Corbitt, who was clearly clueless about the situation. He wanted to know the details of the case and said, ‘I’ll be at the school until four pm. If you find her can you call me back?’ Then he rang off without giving me his number.
    While I was trying to remain calm for Alfie’s sake, I took the call in the back garden and gave Mr Worship five barrels of my fury. I told him that I was absolutely disgusted with the school and the insulting lack of contact and support that I’d had. I told him my mother and sister had been over to the school onthe Friday to see if they could find out any information and all they had been offered was a cup of tea and a prayer. And as for that letter about extra maths tuition … That was just a sick joke.
    What Mr Worship then said to me wound me up even more. He told me that he had been at his desk all weekend and made a special point of telling me that he’d given up his weekend and his family time to be there – as if I should be grateful after all the hell that his school had put me through!
    But I needed answers; I also needed practical advice about what to do. So far, all I’d got from the school was a head teacher who had generously given up his weekend to wait for news! I couldn’t have been angrier.
    After that, the phone never seemed to stop ringing. Next, I got a call and a visit from Mark Ling, the chief inspector for child protection, who wanted to conduct another search through Gemma’s room to see if there was any evidence that they had missed previously.
    Then Mum called to say a family friend had volunteered to create a website dedicated to finding Gemma. Over the course of the next few days, it proved to be incredibly useful. Unfortunately, though, other bogus ‘Find Gemma’ sites started cropping up, with pictures taken from her Facebook and Twitter accounts, and there were all sorts of sick people pretending to be her. With each day that passed, I became increasingly disturbed by the way that some people could behave.
    Lee was particularly furious about the stuff that people were writing on social media sites and took it really badly. I kept trying to reassure him that it didn’t matter what they were saying, that we knew the real Gemma and that everything was being done to get his sister back.
    Finally, on Monday evening, when the police had finished searching Gemma’s room again and my two youngest were in bed, we sat down to watch all of the news programmes that we had recorded on Sky+. It was punishing to see the same report over and over again, my darling daughter’s face taking over the whole of the screen. We sat up until the early hours watching different channels’ coverage of the same footage, hoping against hope that there would be some breaking news or the phone might ring and it would be Gemma, saying she was coming home.

CHAPTER 9
NO CONTACT, PLEASE
    A s 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