The Nightingale Shore Murder Read Online Free

and saw no obvious signs of a struggle. Florence was sitting in her corner seat with an open book on her lap, and her hat on the seat beside her on top of a small case. The only anomalies were a newspaper, partly on the seat and partly on the floor, which had blood on it; and Florence’s glasses, which were on the floor.
    Instinctively, Duck spoke to the injured woman, asking ‘However did you come by these injuries?’ – but he got no reply. He thought however that the injured woman had heard him, as he later gave evidence that ‘she turned her eyes round’. Other evidence given by the platelayers at the inquest would corroborate this, and raise the disturbing possibility that Florence was still partly conscious at that point, at least an hour after the attack, but unable to call for help. In view of the seriousness of her injuries, the guard made the decision not to remove Florence from the train at Bexhill. Instead, he took the train on to Hastings, while George Walters stayed with Florence in the compartment. At Hastings, she was carried from the train to an ambulance, and taken to the hospital in the town. According to one newspaper report, one of Florence’s friends from St Leonards was at Hastings station to meet her, and saw her carried unconscious from the train.
    It was only after the train had arrived at Hastings that Duck became aware of the blood spatters on the back of the seat, and some marks on the floor that he thought might also have been bloodstains. He also did not know at this stage that some of Florence’s clothing was torn, including her undergarments. Something appalling had obviously happened in the blood-stained carriage; and as a seasoned railwayman, Harry Duck must have immediately wondered if it had taken place while the train was in the Merstham Tunnel.

Chapter 3
The Merstham Tunnel
    If the Brighton Belle was one of LB&SCR’s proud claims to fame, the Merstham tunnel was a much less desirable one. It had already drawn the attention of the police on two separate occasions, because two other savage murders had taken place in trains on this same piece of track.
    The train passed through the Merstham tunnel in the early stages of the journey south, between Purley and Redhill in Surrey. The tunnel was completed in the late 1830s by the London and Brighton Railway company. It is 1 mile 71 yards (1.67km) long, and takes the track through part of the North Downs, north of the town of Merstham. A locomotive travelling at 60 miles per hour would spend just over one minute in the tunnel; at a more sedate 30 mph, little more than two. Time enough, however, for serious crimes to take place on trains passing through.
    The more recent of the two previous murder victims on the Brighton Line was Mary Sophia Money, whose body was discovered in the Merstham tunnel on 24 September, 1905. Her story is told on the town’s website:
    â€˜In late September 1905 in the mile long tunnel just north of Merstham Station a horrific discovery was made when a member of the permanent way, William Peacock, found the mutilated body of a young woman, later identified as Mary Sophia Money, about 400 yards into the tunnel. This is thought to be the first recorded murder on a train in England. Finding the body was still warm Peacock hurried back to the station to report his discovery to the stationmaster. The police were called to the scene and when they examined the area they decided that the death was a suicide. They figured that the young woman had wandered into the tunnel and been hit by a passing train. This theory changed when the tunnel wall next to where the body lay was examined. A number of marks were found where the soot had been rubbed off. The highest of these marks was at about the level of a person standing up in a railway carriage. It seemed certain that Mary had fallen from a passing train. A discovery, which turned the theory from suicide into murder, was that forced firmly