What Elizabeth Stride wanted, at any rate, was clear. Over the next thirty minutes, James Maybrick and his mentor shadowed her across most of the East End, from Whitechapel down through Wapping, east into Poplar, a wretched stretch of dockside gambling dens and gin palaces where—so rumor had it—Long Liz and her late husband had once run a profitable little coffee shop, but never once catching her alone. She was being careful, obviously, to stay in the well-crowded streets. It was in Poplar that Stride picked up the sailor. He reeled out of a pub in the company of several of his mates, singing off-key about his long-lost and sorely missed Cardiff. By eleven forty-five, she and her sailor, a young man in a cutaway black coat and ubiquitious sailor’s hat, were strolling down Berner Street, back in Whitechapel, where they paused in the doorway to number 64, waiting out another brief rain shower. A passerby glanced up and noticed them kissing, but failed to notice either Maybrick or Lachley where they stood across the road in the shadows, watching and listening.
“You would say anything but your prayers,” the sailor laughed, voice carrying across Berner Street. And a moment after that, when the passerby had turned onto Fairclough Street and was out of earshot, “How about it, then? Will you?”
“ ‘Course I will, there’s a nice quiet spot just down the street, Dutfield’s Yard, where they used to make carts. Nobody uses the yard at midnight, luv. Mr. Dutfield moved his cart-making business over to Pinchin Street and the sack maker’s shop next to it’s closed this time of night. And there’s a dry stable in there, empty now the carts have gone.”