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‘Only now I’m scared, you see. Because I know that the driver probably didn’t do anything other than drive Mrs. Rowe home like he was supposed to. And those men that I saw going in to her house early that morning and then coming back out later on, well they almost certainly did have something to do with what happened to her. But if they can just walk into her house and … and do whatever they did to that poor woman and then just walk out, calm as you like, and drive off, and then later on make it look like it was all that driver’s doing, well it made me wonder what they might do to me if I were to interfere. I have no-one Sheriff, not since my Harold died. They could come in here and kill me and it might be weeks before anyone would even think to notice I wasn’t around.’

She paused to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘Well, perhaps that might not be such a bad thing. I’ve told the children in my class year after year never to be afraid to do the right thing and here I am, the first real test I’m put to and I sit on my hands for thirty years while that poor man is locked up in jail.’

Lars reached across the table and put his hand on the old woman’s.

‘It’ll be alright Mrs. Mortimer. The important thing is that you do the right thing now and come forward with what you know.’

He finished his tea. It was getting late and he had a long drive ahead of him if he were to make it back to Hawthorne that night. He stood up from the table, took a card from his wallet, flipped it over and scribbled his home telephone number on the back, handing it to her as they stood in the small hallway.

‘There you go. The number of the sheriff’s office is on the front and I’ve written my home number on the back, just in case. This is a matter for the FBI now, and I suspect you’ll be hearing from them before too long.  In the meantime though you feel free to call me any time of the day or night, even if you just want to talk.’

The old woman stood in her doorway watching him as he walked back across the street to where his cruiser was parked. By the time he had driven to the end of the street to turn around she had gone back inside.

17

ALISON
WOKE
TO the sound of her mother in the kitchen preparing breakfast, the smell of fresh coffee wafting up the stairs and into her room. She showered quickly, throwing on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and headed downstairs. A stack of blueberry pancakes sat in the middle of the table beside an unopened jar of maple syrup and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. It had been her favorite growing up. Her mother smiled when she saw her, asking how she had slept.

She had slept surprisingly well. It had been a busy day, what with the excitement of the sheriff’s visit and travelling back from the university, and she had been more tired than she had realized. The soft mattress and warm flannel sheets on the bed in her room had sent her to sleep as soon as her head had touched the pillow.

While her mother poured her a mug of coffee she mentioned that she planned to walk into Manchester to see whether she could find anywhere to fax a copy of the photograph of Jackson to the sheriff in Hawthorne.

‘There’s one of those new internet places just off Main Street, right next to the music shop.’ To Violet Stone anything that had arrived in Manchester over the last ten years was by default new, especially if it had anything to do with technology. ‘I suspect they might be able to help you.’

Alison went into the sitting room to get the picture frame from the sideboard, marveling again at the similarity between Jackson and Gant as she brought it back to the kitchen table. While she waited for her coffee to cool she turned the picture over. The frame had a wooden back that was held in place by simple swivel catches on the top and one of the side edges. A strip of brown masking tape had been placed all around the edge of the back section, over the catches, to hold it in place. She searched for the edge of the tape with her finger. Once she had found the edge and lifted it with a fingernail it came away easily, the adhesive long since dried out. The catches were a little stiff but using the knife her mother had left on the table for her pancakes she managed to turn each one sufficiently to allow the back of the frame to be lifted free. She lifted the photograph out, holding it by its edges between her fingers. She would never grow tired of looking at her father in this picture.  

  She turned it over to see whether there might be a date. Sure enough, in the top left hand corner in her father’s neat handwriting were the words
January, 1971
. Beneath, in the center and slightly to the left of the photo her father had written
Garcia
and just to the right of that
Davids
. Holding the photo up to the light she could see that her father had written the names behind where the two men were seated in the cargo area of the Huey. To the far right of the reverse of the photograph, behind where Jackson was standing, her father had written
Cody
.

She called her mother.

‘What is it dear?’

‘Did Dad ever call Luke Jackson by another name?’

Her mother left the porridge she had been stirring on the stove, coming over to stand beside her.

‘Why yes, yes I believe he did. Well you know in the air force a lot of the pilots had names they called each other. Sort of like nicknames. What did they call them? Call signs. That’s it. Although I don’t ever remember your father having one. Now let me see what was Jackson’s? Cody. That was it.’ She reached into her pocket for her reading glasses. ‘Why see, it’s written there on the back of that photo. Is that important?’

‘I don’t know.’

She stared at the photo again. It was as her mother said, it wasn’t just that Jackson and Gant bore a resemblance to each other, they were identical. She sat at the table for a little while, lost in thought. After a few minutes she got up, her breakfast untouched. Grabbing her coat from the back of the chair, she carefully placed the photograph in the inside pocket. She told her mother she was going in to town and that she’d be back in an hour.

Main Street was busy with last minute Christmas shoppers and she threaded her way through the crowds. She found the internet café where her mother had said it would be, sandwiched between Hedley’s Music Supplies and a small newsagent. The café had seen better days. The computers looked old, bulky beige CRT screens sitting on formica worktops that were chipped and stained from what looked like years of use. The place was empty. She guessed most people just didn’t need to use places like this anymore. She went up to the counter, taking the photograph of Jackson with her father to the desk, and asked whether it could be scanned and sent to one of the machines. She could email it to the sheriff. A bored teenager gave her a password and directed her to a cubicle towards the back.

Alison logged on, the web browser bringing her to the Google homepage. As she waited for the scanned image of the photo to appear on the screen her mind wandered back to Gant and Jackson. There had to be some explanation why they looked so alike. The cursor blinked inside the search field, inviting her to enter something.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. She might as well occupy herself while she waited for the scanned photo to arrive.

A search for Carl Gant revealed nothing, but that wasn’t surprising. It made sense that the Navy wouldn’t want to have details of active members of one of its special forces units available on the internet.

Next she tried Jackson. There were several hits. According to the first article she read Chief Warrant Officer Luke Jackson was one of the longest serving pilots of the conflict, having been in Vietnam almost continuously from when the war had begun in ’65 until his death six years later. He’d enlisted as 11B, infantry, later that year fighting with the massively outnumbered American forces at Ia Drang, the first major engagement between the US and the NVA in Vietnam. According to the article it was at Ia Drang that Jackson had witnessed first hand the role that helicopters were to play in armed conflict. Huey pilots had dropped his company at the base of Chu Pong mountain and had provided air support throughout the battle, re-supplying them with ammunition, evacuating the wounded, and finally, four days later lifting the survivors and the dead off the field. Jackson had applied to the Air Cav the week after. He had completed his infantry tour in April the following year, and had returned stateside to begin primary flight at Fort Wolters, Texas, four months later moving to Fort Rucker, Alabama to complete advanced flight and collect his silver wings. By Christmas of 1966 he had been back in Vietnam, where he had remained until his Huey had been shot down over Laos four years later. She checked each of the other links but there were no photos of Jackson.

Well, that hadn’t got her very far. A file containing the scanned photo of Jackson with her father had appeared on the computer’s desktop and she contemplated just sending it to the sheriff and logging off. But it occurred to her that there was one more search she should try.

She typed her search into the Google bar and hit ‘Enter’. An instant later the screen filled with the first page of her search results, the search engine proudly indicating that it had found over thirty million results for the word
Cody
in only 0.26 seconds. She scrolled through the first ten results - a town in Park County, Wyoming, named after William Frederick Cody, aka Buffalo Bill; a recruitment firm in London, England; an airport serving the East Yellowstone region. There was nothing more relevant in the pages that followed.

She needed to narrow the search. What else did Gant and Jackson have in common? They were both in the military. She returned to the search box and typed
Cody Military OR Navy OR Air Force OR Army OR Marines
. Again it took only an instant for the search engine to return its results; this time it had found just over a million. She scrolled through the first page. Stats on someone who played college football for the Air Force Falcons; an Air Force recruitment center from that town in Wyoming. There were a number of hits on the second page for servicemen whose name was Cody – a Chief Master Sergeant James A. Cody stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, a Major General Richard N. Cody of the United States Air Force Defense Nuclear Agency in Washington, D.C. But it was immediately obvious from the pictures they had posted that neither had anything to do with Gant or Jackson. The next two pages returned nothing of relevance either, and she was about to give up. She decided to try one more page and then she would call it a day. She clicked the
Next
icon at the bottom of the page and the screen refreshed, the header telling her that she was viewing results 41-50. The first few results yielded nothing. Half way down the page was a link to a website that listed fighter aces of the Korean war, the summary section highlighting
Jason Mitchell
. She clicked on the link. It took a moment for the page to load and then she was looking at a table listing those F-86 pilots who had shot down five or more enemy aircraft. At the top of the table was Jason ‘Cody’ Mitchell, with thirteen confirmed kills. She clicked on his name and a second later the website directed her to a page dedicated just to him. At the top of the page was a black and white image of a pilot climbing into the cockpit of an old single-seater fighter jet, his helmet under one arm, the other holding the edge of the open canopy. His back was to the camera but he had turned his head around, as if to respond to whoever had taken the photo. His short dark hair was ruffled by the wind and there was a trace of a smile on his lips, as if he was sharing a joke with whoever was behind the camera.

She sat back in the plastic seat, staring at the screen, barely able to believe what she was seeing.

The man was identical to Gant and Jackson.

The website indicated that the photo was one of the few that were known to exist of Second Lieutenant Jason ‘Cody’ Mitchell. It had been taken in March 1953. Later that month Mitchell had been shot down over the Yalu River by the Russian fighter ace Colonel Yevgeny Grupolov. Mitchell’s wingman had seen him eject but that far behind enemy lines there had been little hope of him evading capture, even if he had survived. He had been declared MIA – missing in action – and the air force had changed his status to KIA a few months later when he hadn’t been among the prisoners of war returned as part of the armistice. His body had never been recovered.

Alison sent the link to her hotmail account and printed the page. A search of the name Jason Mitchell yielded a few sites referring to the exploits of the Korean fighter pilot, but none contained any information beyond that which she had found in the first site.

She sat back in her chair, staring at the screen. The resemblance Mitchell, Jackson and Gant bore to each other was incredible, more than could be explained by them sharing a common ancestor. Was it possible the military had been experimenting with reproductive cloning? The technology had existed for some time, although its use with human subjects was universally regarded as unethical and had been banned in most countries. She had to get this information to the sheriff to impress upon him the importance of finding this man.

She was about to compose an email when it occurred to her that she still didn’t know why each of the men she had found called themselves Cody. The name had to mean something to them.

She started a new search, this time typing
Cody name origin OR meaning
into the field at the top of the page. Once again there were numerous results, but most just referred to the origins of the name:
Cuidighthigh
– an unpronounceable Gaelic surname from the thirteenth century meaning ‘helpful person’. Which didn’t help her at all.

But she had asked the wrong question, hadn’t she? The meaning of the name wasn’t what she needed to find out. It was the meaning of the name
to them
. A Google search was unlikely to provide her with that information. What could be so important about that name to these men?