Walking on eggshells

I went to train in Manchester a year or so after the Moors murders, and they continued to hang over the city like an old-fashioned smog, sickening and inescapable. Reporters who had covered the trial in Chester and heard the tape of Lesley Ann Downey pleading for mercy and begging for her mother said that they used to lie awake at night hearing the little girl’s screams.