The following story is the winner of The Conversation Prize for writers, a competition run in partnership with Faber and Curtis Brown. Read more about the competition here.
A young man called David Lace sits in a windowless interrogation room in a Portsmouth police station. He has just been arrested over a spate of burglaries across the city. Out of the blue, in the middle of the interview he tells the detectives something extraordinary. He’s killed someone, he says. A young woman.