Annie took the first right on Little Paternoster Row, and when the night watchman saw her last she was on Brushfield Street, which ran east to west between what was then called Bishopsgate Without Norton Folgate and Commercial Street. Had she headed but a few blocks north on Commercial Street, she would have reached Shoreditch, where there were several music halls (the Shoreditch Olympia, Harwood’s, and Griffin’s). A little farther north was Hoxton – or the very route Walter Sickert sometimes took when he walked home to 54 Broadhurst Gardens after evenings at various music halls, theaters, or wherever it was he went on his obsessive wanderings late at night and in the early morning hours.
At 2:00 A.M., when Annie emerged onto London’s East End streets, it was fifty degrees and sodden out. She was dressed in a black skirt, a long black jacket hooked at the neck, an apron, wool stockings, and boots. Around her neck was a piece of a black woollen scarf tied in front with a knot, and under it she wore a handkerchief that she recently had bought from another lodger. On the wedding ring finger of her left hand she wore three base metal or “flash” rings. In a pocket on the inside of her skirt was a small comb case, a piece of coarse muslin, and a torn bit of envelope that she had been seen to pick off the lodging-house floor and use to tuck away two pills she had gotten from the infirmary. The torn envelope had a red postmark on it.
If anyone saw Annie alive over the next three and a half hours, no witness ever came forward. At quarter to five, thirty-seven-year-old John Richardson, a porter at the Spitalfields Market, headed toward 29 Han-bury Street, a rooming house for the poor that, like so many other dilapidated dwellings in Spitalfields, had once been a barnlike workplace for weavers to toil on hand looms until steam power had put them out of business. Richardson’s mother rented the house and sublet half of its rooms to seventeen people. He, being the dutiful son, had dropped by, just as he always did when he was up early, to check the security of the cellar. Two months ago someone had broken into it and had stolen two saws and two hammers. His mother also ran a packing-case business, and stolen tools were no small matter.
Satisfied that the cellar was safely locked, Richardson went through a passage that led into the backyard and sat on the steps to cut a bothersome piece of leather off his boot. His knife was “an old table knife,” he later testified at the inquest, “about five inches long,” and he had used it earlier to cut “a bit of carrot,” then absently tucked the knife into a pocket. He estimated he was sitting out on the steps no longer than several minutes, his feet resting on flagstone that was just inches from where Annie Chapman’s mutilated body would be found. He neither heard nor saw anyone. Richardson laced up his mended boot and headed to the market just as the sun began to rise.
Albert Cadosch lived next door at 25 Hanbury, his backyard separated from 29 Hanbury by a temporary wooden fence that was five to five and a half feet high. He later told police that at 5:25 A.M., he walked into his backyard and heard a voice say “No” from the other side of the fence. Several minutes later, something heavy fell against the palings. He did not check to see what had caused the noise or who had said “No.”
Five minutes later, at 5:30 A.M., Elisabeth Long was walking along Hanbury Street, heading west to Spitalfields Market, when she noticed a man talking to a woman only a few yards from the fence around the yard at 29 Hanbury Street, where Annie Chapman’s body would be found on the other side barely half an hour later. Mrs. Long testified at the inquest that she was “positive” the woman was Annie Chapman. Annie and the man were talking loudly but seemed to be getting along,
Mrs. Long recalled. The only fragment of the conversation she overheard as she made her way down the street was the man asking, “Will you?” and the woman identified as Annie replying, “Yes.”