The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel Read Online Free

overcrowded that she had to wait for an hour before she could get on a train, and another hour to get on one of the replacement buses to continue her journey. All of London seemed to be out swarming on the streets, like frenzied bees whose hive had been violated.
    Laura was visibly shaken by the apocalyptic scenes she had witnessed on her way home. When things go wrong, the thin veneer of civilized behaviour that we think of as natural wears off as quickly as make-up in the rain. People, Laura said, got into ugly fights to secure places on the overcrowded buses; an old man brutally pushed a girl out of the bus to make room for his wife. The girl fell on her face and didn’t move, and nobody got off to help her (Laura was pressed tightly against a window on the upper deck, from where she could see but not intervene). When the bus was full to breaking point the driver was too scared to stop at the designated stops, where angry mobs were waiting to get on, prepared to use violence to fight for their right to get home.
    The three of us sat closely huddled together on the sofa all evening and stayed up until the early hours. We kept pressing each other’s hands and stared at the TV in disbelief. Around midnight, when the identity of the attacker was revealed, the shock was almost worse than the one I had experienced in the vet’s waiting room when the story first broke. Nobody was prepared for this. I suppose we all assumed that a group of fanatical Islamists, angry alienated jihadists with nothing to lose, were responsible. When the bomber’s picture first flickered across our screens, I (and I am sure the rest of the nation, too) thought that this had to be a mistake. I found myself incapable of establishing a connection between the image of the beautiful, earnest-looking young woman and the other pictures we had seen – the twenty-two body bags lined up in a grim, neat row on Paternoster Square, and the footage of the victims who had survived, and of the relatives of the dead howling in pain, burying their faces in their hands, and of the terrible scene of devastation that gaped like a raw, deep wound right in the heart of our city.
    Something struck me about Julia White’s face, from the moment I first saw it. I couldn’t quite articulate it then. I thought it at once utterly alien and at the same time uncannily familiar. Above all I was fascinated by the serenity of her gaze: her still, slightly slanted green eyes in that finely chiselled, delicately pale face suggested an old-souled wisdom, someone who has seen more than their fair share of sadness and suffering, and yet there was something else in those eyes that I couldn’t quite fathom. Julia was looking straight into the camera, her full lips unsmiling, her expression strangely unreadable. There was an unsettling contrast between her disconcerting gaze and her soft, milky-white skin. In that first picture to enter the public domain (many others were to follow) her long chestnut-brown hair was tied back into a bun, and she was wearing a crisp white man’s shirt and a grey sleeveless pullover. Like an Oxford student from the seventies; perhaps with a hint of Marlene Dietrich. As I learned later, this picture was taken four years before the attacks, one month before Julia dropped out of university and went travelling.
    I think the seeds for what happened later were sown the very moment I saw that picture (and that particular image was to remain the one that haunted me – it still does): I simply couldn’t imagine what might have led a beautiful, highly intelligent young woman, privileged in all sorts of ways, to perpetrate the most ruthless terrorist act that had been committed in Britain since the Lockerbie bombing and the 7/7 attacks. I think the most disturbing thing was that she appeared to be so very much like us – twenty-seven, just two years older than Laura, and similar in so many ways. I could picture the two of them chatting away in Laura’s café and