The Nightingale Shore Murder Read Free Page B

Bexhill and then Hastings, from where Florence planned to continue her journey to Warrior Square station in St Leonards. The remainder of the train would travel on to Eastbourne. It was at Bexhill station, however, that the train staff were finally alerted to the fact that this journey was no longer routine. Something terrible had happened in one of the third class carriages.

Chapter 2
What happened at Bexhill
    Bexhill, a seaside town just 10 minutes from the journey’s end, was the last scheduled stop for the train before Hastings. The guard on the Hastings train was Henry James Duck, known as Harry, from the nearby town of St Leonards: Florence’s ultimate destination. Duck had been in charge of the train from Victoria, accompanied by Guard George Walters, and Guard Herriet. A photograph of the three men, who were to be key players in the events that followed, shows them each wearing the long dark jackets of the LB&SCR uniform, with a double row of brass buttons and the company’s initials on the collar. Each wears a watch-chain across the front of the jacket, and a peaked cap with the company badge on the front. Duck and Herriet wear traditional neckties; Walters has a bow tie. Henry Duck has a heavy dark moustache and heavy eyebrows.
    When the train divided at Polegate Junction, Duck was in charge of the Hastings portion. He signalled to the guard on the Eastbourne train that all was well when his part of the train was ‘slipped’ just before Polegate, and stepped off the train at the station to check on his carriages. He saw nothing out of the ordinary during this stop. Although he did not notice it at the time, three railway workers – George Clout, Ernest Thomas and William Ransom, all platelayer’s labourers employed by the LB&SCR – had joined the train at Polegate. They had taken seats in the same third class compartment as Florence. Once on the move again, the train took another 15 minutes to reach its next stop, at Bexhill.
    It was twenty past five in the afternoon, two hours after leaving London, when the Hastings train pulled in to Bexhill station. On that early January afternoon, it was already nearly dark, and it was raining. The guard Harry Duck later described it as a ‘dark and dirty night’; and he inspected the train by the light of his hand-held lamp. There were no lamps at all at Lewes station, and unlikely to have been any at the smaller Bexhill station, where Harry Duck again stepped onto the platform to check on passengers leaving and joining the train, and to make sure that all the doors were shut for departure. This time, however, the stop was not routine. On the platform, the guard was approached by George Clout, one of the platelayers who had joined the train 15 minutes earlier at Polegate Junction. ‘Have you seen that woman back there?’ he asked Duck. ‘She is in a deplorable state.’ Duck looked into the carriage the man was referring to, and saw Florence alone inside, sitting in her corner seat facing the engine. When he got into the carriage, he could see immediately that she had terrible head injuries.
    The platelayers had not realised at first that the lady who they thought was asleep or reading was in fact barely conscious. The carriage was dimly lit, and they would have thought it impolite to stare at a lady passenger. George Clout, who came from Bexhill himself and was on his way home, said that he only began to think that something was wrong about a mile out of Polegate station, when he noticed blood on the lady passenger’s face. He mentioned it to William Ransom, saying he thought that the lady had had ‘a nasty knock’. But Ransom’s hearing was affected by a heavy cold and he did not hear the comment. The remark was heard by the other platelayer, Ernest Thomas: he looked across, but in the poor lighting, he could not tell whether the blood was wet or dry.
    Henry Duck made a hurried inspection of the carriage,