Madge herself is immaculate, a tiny, neat woman whom grief has made two-dimensional. Her eyes are unreadable as two currants on a gingerbread lady, and every day she seems to weigh less and less, as if the pain of her life has leached all appetite, all joy from her. Margo was the second of her seven children to die. Her son Billy was killed in a road accident at the age of 18. ‘That was different,’ she sighs. ‘Nobody forcibly took his life. The last time I saw him I was working night shifts at the Central Hotel. I can still see him standing looking out the window. After the accident he had a bandage round his head and was hooked up to machines. The hardest thing was when the doctor told me they were going to switch them off; he’d been brain dead for 24 hours. But you could say your final goodbye to him. You could feel him going away. With Margo there was nothing. The sense of loss was unreal. It was as if she’d walked out the door and I had to go and look for her because she wasn’t there any more.’
If Madge Lafferty compels sympathy it is not because she solicits it. She is absolute in her dignity, absolute in her loss. Her life has not been easy. Her husband Billy died in 1974, when Margo was only a toddler of three or four. He’d been out drinking the night before and choked in his sleep. If he’d been a drinker, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened, but he was a labourer and couldn’t afford it. He only went out with his pals every six or seven weeks.
After he died Madge was left to struggle along on her own. The children often had to wait if they wanted anything, though they knew Madge would get it for them in the end. They were the first family where they lived to have a video. ‘My oldest boy, Monty, was 16 and kind of took on the role of father figure in the family, but the final responsibility was mine, paying the bills, making sure they had enough to eat,’ remembers Madge. ‘Many a day I went hungry, but luckily, working in hotels you usually got food.’
Theirs was a happy family, the house always full of the kids’ friends. Madge would often have fourteen sit down for Sunday dinner. Margo was second youngest, the only and much longed for girl. Monty wanted his sister to be a little princess and was always buying her frilly things, but she was a tomboy, who would wear her trousers right up to the school gate before changing into the hated uniform skirt. She captained a local football team and could play better than most of the boys. ‘She was never feart [fearful] of anybody or anything in her life,’ says Margo. ‘She was the only one that would face up to Monty. The rest of them would never answer him back but Margo would stand and confront him.’ Ironically for a girl who later made her living in the sex industry, she was naive with boys. There were plenty who were crazy about her and would have done anything for her, but when they came up for her she’d be off. ‘I can’t be bothered with it, Ma,’ she’d say. ‘They’re too serious.’
The family lived in Barlanark, then a run-down estate riddled with social problems. For every decent family there was a drug dealer, for every working person a hopeless drug addict. Now the houses have been done up and many of the problem families moved on; the kids are being educated about the dangers of drugs. Then it was part and parcel of where they lived.
Margo started by sniffing glue, then moved on from there. ‘She was a daring lassie. She wasn’t scared to try anything once. If only she’d realised where it was going to end up,’ says Madge.
From the outside the path to prostitution looks a simple one. In Glasgow most of the women who work the streets are drug addicts, following a basic fiscal law – working class women can only earn the sort of money executives earn by selling their bodies. But this simple economic equation is dense with complexity when examined in human terms. There is nothing straightforward about it. Margo was on drugs, so she was in the house one minute, out the next. She was staying with this ‘friend’ one night, with another ‘friend’ the next. She was laughing and carrying on one minute, gouching [nodding off] on the sofa the next, head bent, her mind out of it.
Things came to a head when Madge came home from work one day. She had the kettle on and was relaxing before making dinner when she heard this unearthly moan from Margo’s room. When she went in her daughter was lying on the floor. Madge thought she was dead. She was blue. Her lips were blue, and her face, and there was a needle sticking out of her groin. Madge pulled the syringe out and slapped Margo’s face to make sure she was breathing. When Margo woke 15 minutes later and was told what had happened, she called her mother a liar. ‘I says, “I’m sorry, Margo. I can’t take any more of this.” By this time I knew she was out on the streets as well. She says, “Fine, Ma.” She left. I didn’t put her out of the house. The lassie knew herself she couldn’t go on like that. It had got to the stage where you were feared to leave her in the house. You didn’t know what was going to be missing when you got back. I told her I would keep HER, but I wasn’t knocking my pan in to keep her drug dealers.’
The Margo Lafferty who’d been a carefree, laughing child, charming enough to coax sweeties from the man on the ice cream van when she had no money, had become, in the eyes of the world, Margo Lafferty, the prostitute, Margo Lafferty, the junkie. As a young girl Margo had been soft-hearted, always ready to help someone in trouble, always picking up pals. Once she brought home a school friend who’d lost her mother; she stayed six years and whenever Margo got something Linda got the same.
Now Margo was still ready to help people, but the trouble they were in had become far more dangerous, led to a different sort of assistance being offered. Many of the other girls on the streets would go to her when they needed physical protection. This five foot woman was tough and aggressive and would use her fists to back them. ‘I’ve seen her taking the jacket off her back and giving it to an old woman in the street, but she had a bad temper,’ says her mother. ‘You needed to watch her because she’d hit you as soon as look at you. She was very brave physically. Not that she went out looking for bother, but she wouldn’t run away from it either. That was why I told the police that Margo fought, that whoever had murdered Margo had been well and truly scarred. She would fight for every minute of her life and every second.’
The transition Margo made, from family pet to prostitute, was seen by the outside world as the transition from person to problem. Madge Lafferty fights every minute and every second to hold on to who her daughter was because society writes her off, makes her an accomplice in her own death. ‘You’re sitting in work and people are talking, new staff maybe, not the ones that were there at the time. And they always bring Margo’s name up if anything happens. They’ll maybe come across a wee caption in the paper and they go, “Look at that. These lassies deserve it.” I just get up and walk away. Or occasionally I’ll say, “Look at it this way. They’re out there, taking the chance of being jailed, and there’s others sitting next to you that are giving it away for nothing.” Margo could have been out mugging old folk or breaking into houses. But she didn’t do that. She went out and did a job of work.’
Perhaps because she was as fearless in her work as in her life, Margo Lafferty ended up taking on two violent sex offenders as clients in one night. In that dark piece of waste ground, after she was dead, the police picked up two condoms carrying Brian Donnelly’s semen, and one with the semen of David Payne, a convicted sex offender who had been jailed for holding up a woman at knife point and indecently assaulting her. That two such men should be in this secret place with the same woman almost beggars belief, until you remember Glasgow’s unenviable record of seven murders of prostitutes in as many years. There never was a serial killer here, as was suggested by some newspapers, simply an endless supply of men who thought women’s lives were worth nothing.
It was Brian Donnelly who had deep scratch marks on his face; Brian Donnelly who lied both to the police and to his workmates; Brian Donnelly who had been knocked back by a couple of girls on his work’s outing, his virility slighted; Brian Donnelly who had battered and strangled Margo Lafferty. At the retrial earlier this month the jury took under an hour and a half to bring in a unanimous verdict of murder. Donnell
y was cool in the dock, as if his whole nervous system had closed down and was in hibernation mode. He seemed too measured and dispassionate ever to indulge in rage. But he had previously tried to set fire to the house of his former girlfriend and their son and he had also mugged an old woman.
‘He wasn’t any innocent young boy,’ says Madge Lafferty. ‘I hoped someone would kill him when he went into prison after the first trial. I was wishing retribution would be served in another way. There’s no closure in this for me. Not as long as he breathes. I believe in the Old Testament, in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ she says. It’s a rare moment of anger. Mostly she speaks in so emotionless a manner that you feel she would crack wide open if she ever lost control.
Now she and her family are left with the conundrum of life after violent death. Madge says Margo’s brothers didn’t know what she did and had to read about her choice of profession in the newspapers, though that’s incidental to the pain of losing their sister. She was afraid they would get themselves in trouble if they came to the court and the jury voted for acquittal, but the verdict was heard in total silence.
At nearly sixty, Madge is still a workaholic. When Margo was alive she used to keep on working for her sake. She was the only one of the family who still came and asked her for money. She’d empty her purse to the local kids and then say, ‘But I’ve got you, Ma.’ Now Madge has a granddaughter who lives with her. She’s a lot like Margo. She’s always running about dancing and singing, wanting her CDs on. She stands in the kitchen and gives it big licks. She can’t sing but she knows the words to everything. ‘She’s so full of confidence. So was Margo, full of her own importance,’ she says, smiling. ‘I hope she keeps that.’
When Margo died it was a full three months before they could bury her. They weren’t allowed to cremate her, in case her body had to be exhumed for evidential purposes in the future, though Margo herself would have preferred to be cremated. She was afraid of creepy crawlies, couldn’t bear the thought of worms going through her body. Now Madge thinks the bureaucrats did her a favour. ‘Now I know I can go up to her grave and just stand there and talk to her,’ she says. ‘I know she’s never going to stand in front of me or cuddle me, which she always used to do. But at least I know where she is.’
Further Reads
You can find other great titles at our website www.milobooks.com or available for Kindle on the Amazon website, including:
Casuals
Cinderella Man
City Psychos
Cocky: The Rise and Fall of Curtis Warren
Gang War
Gun Law
Guvnors
Hands of Stone
Hit Man
Hookers
Hooligans
Hooligans 2
Journey To Hell
No Retreat
Perry Boys
Red Army General
Scally
Service Crew
Soul Crew
Suicide Squad
The Brick
The Boys From The Mersey
The Frontline
The Men in Black
The Turkish Mafia
Villains
Young Guns
Zulus
And in our Gangs Of series:
The Gangs of Birmingham
The Gangs of Liverpool
Gangs of London
The Gangs of Manchester
Tearways: More Gangs of Liverpool
Milo Books specialises in sports and true crime and many of our titles are now available for download to electronic readers and other digital devices.
Hookers: Their Lives in Their Words Page 19