Winged heart with keyhole and crown

It is gone two and the rain has not let up on Crane Street since teatime. I had the shutter down early, but Mrs Okafor's tin came in at nine, the one her husband locked before he went down to the docks in '79 and never came back to open. She wanted it done before the Thursday sale. Nobody has managed that lock in forty years, not even Dad, who swore he could open anything with a bent hairpin.

The mechanism was a stubborn thing, six levers and a false gate. I worked it with the picks you left me, the ones with the worn blue grip, and somewhere around half past eleven it gave. Inside there was no money and no letters. Only a brass heart the size of my palm, with a keyhole cut through the middle and two little curls at the top like the ends of a violin scroll. Someone had sat with very fine tools and made the wings on either side, feather by feather, and a tiny crown perched above it all, so small I nearly missed it under the lamp.

I told her what I had found and she laughed, a proper laugh, and said the keyhole was the joke. Her husband had never meant to lock anything. He meant to keep the key on his own chain, so that wherever he flew she would always have a way in.

I have set the heart on the bench beside your old rubber mallet. The rain has stopped. If you write from Lisbon, tell me whether a key can be a promise. I think the answer is in the wings, and I am going to bed.