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. The sense of a horror that existed on the fringe of normal life, yet hovered unnervingly nearby, was made worse by the moors themselves. These are not the cosy landscapes of the Peak District but are desolate and displeasing; the kind of scenery you never see on the cover of a Beautiful Britain calendar. They tend to be repetitive and featureless, and this made it hard for the police to find the victims’ graves even with the help of Hindley’s and Brady’s gloating photographs — one scene looks very like another.

See No Evil: The Moors Murders (ITV, Sunday and Monday) caught this sense of the banal co-existing with the terrible in its first shots, when a dark cloud rolling over moorland faded to Herman’s Hermits singing ‘I’m Into Something Good’. The chirpy, optimistic song worked as an ironic foretaste of the horrors to come.

Except there were no horrors. The production oozed tastefulness. The sound of the producers walking on eggshells was almost deafening. It had been made with the co-operation of the victims’ families and in a way it served as a memorial to all five of them, an effect heightened at the end of part two when pictures of them all appeared, like the photos on Italian gravestones. This increased the poignancy as we realised that these innocents would, had they lived, have been middle-aged by now, fretting about their children’s late return from the market — even their grandchildren.