Heart keyhole, pistons and roses sketch

She wanted the engine opened. Her husband had died in February with the lorry half-stripped on the drive, and he had left a list of parts in pencil on the back of a seed catalogue. Ferris read it twice. Two pistons, rings, a gasket that had been cut from a cereal box. He told her it would take a month. She said she had a month and a half and a sister in Carlisle who would not wait longer.

They worked through the winter in the stone shed with the wireless on low, Maud passing spanners and bringing soup at noon. The pistons came out black with age and Ferris turned them under the lamp. On the crown of one he found a keyhole scratched in with a nail, small and neat, and nothing else. Maud said her husband had always claimed a heart was only a lock, and the trick was finding the key. Ferris didn't answer. He fitted the rings.

When the engine turned over in April it ran as smooth as a clock. Maud paid him in cash and a jar of quince jam, and she drove out of the gate without looking back. Three weeks later a flat parcel arrived with no return address: a sheet of drawing paper with a banner sketched across the middle, left blank, and a note in pencil that said only, Put the name in. I'll know it when I see it.