And so the night waned into the small hours. At nearly one-thirty in the morning, she returned to a lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street and remained inside its kitchen for several minutes, until the lodging house deputy escorted her to the door and said, “Get your doss money, ducks, an’ don’t come back ‘til you ‘ave it.”
“Won’t you save a bed for me?” she asked the man. “Never mind! I’ll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now?” And she touched the black, velvet-lined straw hat with caressing fingers. “I’ve ‘ad money tonight and I’ll get more just as easy, I will, an’ I’ll be back wiv my doss money soon enough.”
And so out onto the streets she wandered again, clearly searching for another customer to procure more gin to while away the time before their three-thirty appointment—presumably having retrieved the letters Lachley sought from the room she was not yet able to pay for and would not be needing, ever again. Maybrick followed her silently, as did the all-but-invisible John Lachley, a mere shadow of a shape in the darkness ahead, the paler blur of Lachley’s skin lit now and again by the lightning flaring across the sky. The rumble of thunder threatened more rain. It would need rain, to wash away the blood James would spill into these streets . . .
Polly Nichols stumbled and staggered her way through the better part of an hour, approaching and being turned down by one prospect after another, leading James and his mentor eventually toward the corner of Whitechapel Road and Osborn Street. There, she put out a hand to brace herself and greeted a woman coming up Osborn. “Well, if it in’t Emily ‘olland,” she slurred, “where you been?”