Above them now, voices reached through the mud and wood. The sound of shifting earth. Connie was out of time. She pulled harder on the belt loop, and the sound of his breath was the scrape of nails on a blackboard. He was fighting hard, still stronger than her. Still dangerous. Untreatable.

In the darkness, Connie saw a different face. A young man convinced there were aliens giving him instructions through some special psychic link. Connie beneath him, fighting for her life.

Their hands slick with sweat, Fergus freed himself from her grasp, reaching up to Connie’s face, searching for one of her eyes with his thumb. She scrunched her eyes shut tight, moving her head left and right in the confinement, his nail pushing its way through her eyelid and forcing its way to her eyeball. She grabbed his little finger, snapping it to the side, cracking the bone in half, then reached for the next finger in and repeated the exercise. Still his grip was iron on her face as she kept the pressure on the belt buckle, strangling him.

He couldn’t face trial.

He couldn’t live his life in a hospital.

Fergus/Harris couldn’t be treated. He was far too damaged and dangerous for that.

This was the truth that Connie knew. It was the lesson she’d learned that no university course, no FBI training, no hands-on experience could teach her. This, you had to have seen from the inside.

Taking the deepest breath she could manage, sucking what tiny amounts of oxygen remained in the thin, stinking air, she released his hand. Let him try for her eyes.

With one last monumental effort, she slammed her left hand into the base of his throat, forcing it back against the side of the coffin and giving her the extra inches of space to pull the belt tighter. His thumb pressed into her left eye, and now she could hear the watery squelch of her eyeball, the pressure a pinless grenade inside her skull.

Shovelling above them. Shouts close by.

Seconds left to finish the job. To make sure the legal system didn’t fuck up and release a demon back into the world. Keeping safe those people who might end up on a psychiatric ward with a man capable of using other human beings for his own ends regardless of the cost to them. A man too sick ever to be responsible for his own actions.

Too sick to be helped.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered to him. ‘There’s really no other way.’

She dropped the end of the belt, pushing both of her fists into his already partially collapsed windpipe, the belt having worked its preliminary magic.

Roaring, Connie thrust every last newton of force from her body into his.

Legs juddering, his body trembling against hers, he succumbed.