The Killing of the Tudor Rose.

The Tudor Rose Pub in Alfriston, East Sussex has four video surveillance cameras. One onto the quiet, cramped country street, one overlooking the main bar and another just above the cash register, more to stop employees slipping twenty quid into their pockets than to watch for trouble. All four cameras were cut at seven-fifteen PM. After all, Ivan was a creature of habit. And apart from the three months he was incarcerated, he’d walked into that pub at half past seven on the dot.

The local police noted that the Tudor Rose was unusually full that night. English villages tend to have steady regulars and a certain demographic. Middle class farming types, the quiet solo alcoholics or the hard lads who’d nail their England flag to a pub and call it theirs. The Tudor Rose was a hard pub. And the video surveillance had seen its fair share of unprovoked attacks, glassings and in 1988, an infamous attack that ended with a young student’s left eye being prised out of its socket with a spoon. But that Saturday night was different. The beer taps weren’t as busy and the regulars were joined by other men who normally would have walked on the other side of the street to avoid the front door of the Rose. Fathers. Grandfathers. Uncles.

Of the boys.

Ivan Banis had lived in a caravan near Hamsey Church, about a mile south of Alfriston. He looked fifty, but due to amphetamines, tobacco and a lifetime of alcohol, his real age was anyone’s guess. He was small. He was fat. He smelled of stale cigarettes and old magazines. And he was the first person the police interviewed after nine-year-old Daniel Ramsey was found in a ditch.

The official autopsy showed that Daniel had been wrapped in wire, assaulted, strangled and stripped naked. His clothes and school satchel were never found and any foreign DNA had been completely removed by a generic household bleach, available in any supermarket across the country. With no witnesses, evidence or leads, the police could only hope that long, intense questioning would illicit a confession or at the very least, a lie.

Ivan Banis was questioned for the mandatory forty-eight hours. Police lied about witnesses seeing him near the scene but there was no response. No protestations. His alibi, although flimsy, wasn’t enough to keep him. Ivan might have been slow. But he wasn’t stupid.

Ivan walked into the pub at seven thirty-two. He ordered a bitter cider snakebite and made his way to his usual torn, red leather stool and started feeding fifty-pence pieces into a Slot machine called ‘Wonders of Egypt.’ He had his back to the bar. The jukebox started playing hard, obscure punk from the seventies. Ivan was a regular, so he probably would have wondered why the volume was louder than normal. He definitely wouldn’t have heard the huge roll of plastic sheeting unrolling across the floor.

Seven year-old twins James and Mark Anscombe were found a week after Daniel. A dog walker found them tied, naked and dumped beside the A13 to Eastbourne. They’d both been assaulted, strangled and Mark had been badly beaten. Whispers in the Murder Squad hypothesised if Mark had watched the attack on his brother and tried to fight.

With the Tudor Rose’s video feed cut, someone, probably James Maddis the owner, locked the door and pulled down the window blinds. After all, when the most violent pub in Alfriston was playing punk, very few in the village would have ever have considered trying the door.

Susan Rimmer told police that she’d passed someone who looked like Banis talking to the twins the morning of their disappearance. She said it was ‘unusual’ and that when she glanced her rear view mirror, Banis was walking with them, away from school and towards the woods that separated Hamsey from the A13. Rimmer was a close friend of the Anscombe family, in fact, both her and the twins’ mother worked at a local bank. Despite this, police asked for, and received, a warrant to tear apart Banis’ home. Local news reports showed police in blue coveralls removing laptops in clear, plastic evidence bags.

It was probably decided beforehand who would do what and how far they should go. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment so a couple of the larger men, probably Steve and Ross Tucker from the council estate, who would have stood nearby to make sure everyone had their turn.

It takes a full year for police to analyse hard drives. The actual process is relatively quick, but with the Paedophile Unit arresting multiple people a week, the backlog is immense. And with no evidence linking Banis to any of the boys or indeed a confession, Banis was bailed. But with a terrified county, police couldn’t help but tell the press a man was ‘helping with their inquiries.’ It calmed people down.

It probably lasted an hour. Maybe a little more. The human body is remarkably resilient, even one as ravaged as Ivan Banis’. The regulars were first. The ones who knew how to fight. These were men who were used to attacking strangers out of sheer boredom, so the chance to go to work on a child killer would have been special for them. They would have avoided the head and the genitals, concentrating only on the parts breakable or removable. The arms. Legs. Ears. When they were finished, the families of the boys would have been pushed forward to finish the job with free reign. They would have brought their own tools, all of which had to have been purchased at least a year ago and thrown into a sack at the end for disposal. They probably imagined their sons and grandsons watching as they went to work of what was left of Ivan Banis.

It would have made it easier.

The video surveillance turned back on just after nine. It showed a busy bar. Police noticed that whiskey shots were being poured. Raised. Smashed down and re-poured. There was no sign of Ivan Banis. He’d vanished. A murderer was missing, a man who’d molested, beaten and murdered three children.

The papers wanted blood.

Everyone in the Tudor Rose was interviewed. All stuck to the same story. It was rehearsed. It was simple. Nobody saw Ivan enter. Nobody saw Ivan leave. And fuck it, they were all too hungover to remember much of anything else.

Killing isn’t easy. It comes back. Time and time again. In dreams. In nightmares. When you pick up a blade. The sound of a song. The piercing screams that stay with you like tinnitus. It’s different to a football match kicking or a back alley beating. That’s adrenaline stuff. That’s stuff you tell your mates. But this. This was where mates made the voices and the visions louder and brighter. So you stopped calling them. And you sat and watched killing on TV. It made it look easy and effortless. And you tried to forget the Tudor Rose.

Until Steven Mohr, six-years old, was found dumped against a fence near the cricket pitch.

And then the screaming started again.