Looking Good Dead [antikvár]

1The front door of the once-proud terraced house opened, and a long-legged young woman, in a short siUc dress that seemed to both cling and float at the Scmie time, stepped out into the fine June sunshine on the last morning of her life.A century back, these tall, white villas, just a pebble's throw from Brighton's seafront promenade, would have served as weekend residences for London toffs. Now, behind their grimy, salt-burned facades, they were chopped up into bedsits and low-rent flats; the brass front-door knockers had long been replaced with entry-phone panels, and litter spewed from garbage bags onto the pavements beneath a gaudy riot of letting-agency boards. Several of the cars that lined the street, shoehorned into not enough parking spaces, were dented and rusting, and all of them were saturation-bombed with pigeon and seagull shit.In contrast, everything about the young woman oozed class. From the careless toss of her long fair hair, the sunglasses she adjusted on her face, the bling Carrier bracelet, the Anya Hindmarsh bag slimg from her shoulder, the toned contours of her body, the Mediterranean tan, her wake of Issey Miyake tanging the rush-hour monoxide with a frisson of sexuality, she was the kind of girl who would have looked at home in the aisles of Bergdorf Goodman, or at the bar of a Schräger hotel, or on the stem of a fuck-off yacht in St-Tropez.