Dual Names and the Public Record

In Poland there is a birth certificate under one name. In the United Kingdom there is another. Travis Lee Swift. Jacek. Jacek translates as Jason. Two documents. Two countries. One body that never got to choose. The duplication was not simple administrative error. Evidence suggests something darker and more deliberate. The full truth of the origins remains, by design, obscured. Records that should exist do not. Records that do exist contradict each other. This is not accident. It is architecture.

I was fourteen in 1985. The public record of the Jason Swift case — east London, Sidney Cooke and the men around him, manslaughter convictions at the Old Bailey, a body in a shallow grave in Essex — sits in plain sight. I have said, carefully and clearly, that the official account is not the complete account. What I know and what I survived around that time remains part of the reason this book exists. I will not put the full weight of it on the page until the legal advice is clear. Some things are not for the faint-hearted and some lines, once crossed in print, cannot be uncrossed. The dual identity became practical. Someone else attended my last school in my name. The records never matched. They still do not. The architecture of the real is the architecture of the records that refuse to agree.