Residual Heat

The fake wedding cake had gotten everywhere. Stephen stood in the back room of the bridal shop, twenty-eight years old and six years into a paramedic career, scrubbing at his sleeve with a wet paper towel. The stuff was mostly icing sugar and shortening, and it clung like guilt.

The CPR dummy had gone through the table. That was the short version. The long version involved a bride's aunt, a demonstration at the shop's summer open house, and a chest compression that nobody, including Stephen, had expected to send a three-tier polyurethane cake into the air like a clay pigeon.

"You're the fellow who murdered the cake, then?"

Stephen turned. A man stood in the doorway, maybe forty, dark hair going silver at the temples, holding a red toolbox like a briefcase. Clean shirt, sleeves rolled. He had the calm of someone whose job involved waiting.

"Guilty," Stephen said. "You're next door, right? The funeral place."

"Caleb. Caleb Cavanaugh." He held out a hand, then looked at Stephen's sticky one and withdrew his own before contact. "Quite right, I'll pass on that. Actually, I came about the shears. I borrowed a pair of medical shears from one of your lot in the spring, cutting a strap off a casket, long story, and I've been meaning to return them."

He set the toolbox down and produced the shears. They were clean and folded into a proper case, which told Stephen more about him than the handshake would have.

"You keep them sharpened?"

"I keep everything in order. It's the trade." Caleb tapped the toolbox. "And this is mine, technically. The shop borrowed it when their hinge went and I'm collecting it. Tell them I said so."

The toolbox had CNC stamped on the lid in white paint. Stephen lifted it, tested the weight. "These your initials?"

"They are. Caleb Nicholas Cavanaugh. The Nicholas is my mother's family, and it's on the sign. She wanted a name that looked good on a shopfront."

"Did it work?"

"Judge for yourself. There's a sign six feet from where you're standing."

Stephen had walked past that sign for a month of shifts parked at the kerb. Nicholas & Sons, Funeral Directors, in gold leaf under the linden trees. "It's a good sign," he admitted. "Better than the bridal one, anyway. Their G is falling off."

"We don't speak of their G." Caleb said it perfectly straight, and Stephen laughed before he could stop himself.

"So the shears," Stephen said. "That's the whole errand?"

There was a pause that Stephen had learned to read. People did it before bad news in the back of ambulances. A breath, a small look away.

"Mostly. There's a secondary matter." Caleb set the shears on the counter with care. "I appear to have locked myself out of my flat."

"Your flat. That's above the shop?"

"Above the garage, behind the shop. The key is on the hook by the door, which is inside, which is the problem." He said it without drama, as if giving a weather report. "I've a spare at my sister's in Reading, but she's not answering, and it's Friday, and I've a viewing tomorrow at nine that I'd rather not attend in yesterday's shirt."

Stephen dried his hands properly on his trousers. He was, by nature and training, a man who liked to be good at things in front of witnesses. It was his worst quality and he knew it. Somewhere in his kit was a spare scalpel, wrapped, from a training course two years back, and somewhere behind his sternum was the memory of his cousin showing him how to rake a padlock in a pub beer garden, aged twenty-two, three pints in.

"I could have a go at it," Stephen said. "The lock."

"Could you."

"I've done it before. Not, like, professionally. But locks are stupid, most of them. They're built to keep out honest people and they do a bad job of it."

Caleb looked at him the way you'd look at a junior doctor offering to fix your roof. Not unkind. Measuring. "And you carry lock-picking equipment in an ambulance kit."

"I carry a scalpel in an ambulance kit. The rest is improvisation."

* * *

The trouble started on the front step, in the dark, at half nine.

The flat sat over the funeral home's garage, reached by an outside stair. The lock was one of those keypad-and-fob numbers, the kind Stephen's own building had threatened to install before the tenants' association got wind of the price. Caleb punched in his code and got nothing. No light, no beep. He tried it again, slower, the way you'd speak to someone hard of hearing.

"Dead," he announced. "The battery. It runs off a solar cell on the lintel, which charges by day, and it has, apparently, decided that half past nine is not a day."

"Give it a whack."

"I have given it two whacks. It remains philosophically committed to being dead."

Stephen crouched and looked at it. Plastic housing, small solar strip, a pinhole reset that probably needed the manufacturer's tool. He could feel the evening going. His shift had ended three hours ago, his dinner was a meal deal in his bag, and there was a part of him, the competitive part, that had already decided this was his problem now.

"It's the cold," he said. "These things lose their nerve when the temperature drops. If we warm the mechanism, the cell might wake up long enough to take the code."

"Warm it."

"Rub it. Friction. Heat. It's basic physics."

Caleb raised one eyebrow, slow and deliberate, a man savoring a line he'd waited all evening to say. "I know a more reliable way to generate heat," he said. "But I'd need to be inside to demonstrate, and here we are."

Stephen sat back on his heels. The linden trees did their thing overhead. Down the cul-de-sac a light went off in a window, someone's Friday ending on schedule, unlike his.

"Was that a joke," Stephen said, "or an offer?"

"Presently a joke. I've not decided about the rest."

"You're forty-one and you flirt like a sixth former."

"I'm forty-one and I've not had cause to practice. Six months of dating a woman who was at the theatre until midnight, which ended in the spring, and before that, nothing worth reporting. You?"

"At twenty-six," Stephen said, working the pinhole with the scalpel tip as he talked, because he could not do this conversation face to face. "A co-worker. Two months. Turned out she was married, not separated as advertised, and her husband found a text on her phone addressed to me that began with the word 'buddy' and went downhill from there."

"That's dreadful."

"It was educational. I now verify marital status before the third coffee." He eased the scalpel out and stood. "Right. Your lock is a brick. Cold, dead, and smug about it. We need heat, actual heat, or a professional, and the professionals are closed till Monday."

Caleb took out his phone, checked it, put it away. "My sister in Reading has rung once. It went to voicemail, which means she's at the pictures, which means three hours minimum."

"There's the funeral home. You've a kettle in there, presumably."

"I have a kettle, a microwave, and a flameless heater the size of a filing cabinet. Also a door between there and here that isn't locked, because whoever locks a funeral home has never had to carry anything heavy at speed." He was already moving down the stairs. "Come on, then. If we're going to warm a lock, we'll do it with hot water and dignity, and I'll make you a tea while we wait."

"Make it strong. I've been awake since five."

"What time does a man who destroys wedding cakes wake up?"

"Five, on a good day. Four forty-five when the pager's rude."

* * *

The flat, when they finally got the door open at ten to ten, was not what Stephen expected from a funeral director. He'd braced for either Victorian gloom or some kind of taxidermy situation. Instead it was all pale wood, one good sofa, a single shelf of books arranged by height, and not one personal photograph. It looked like a show flat for someone pretending to be a person.

Through the open garage below, visible from the landing, sat the embalming table. Stainless steel, clean as a kitchen counter, catching the light from the garage's motion lamp.

"You can look at it if you like," Caleb said, hanging his keys, finally, on the hook by the door. "Everyone does. It's better than the questions."

"I'm not staring. I'm a paramedic. I've seen worse tables."

"You've seen worse on the tables, I'm sure. That's not the same as the table." He went to the kitchen area and filled the kettle, which he had apparently brought up from the funeral home on some earlier trip, the kind of detail that said a lot about a man's relationship to tea. "So. You've gotten me inside. The shears are returned, the toolbox is home, the lock is warm and behaving. You could go home now and eat your sandwich in peace."

Stephen realized he was still holding his kit bag, standing just inside the door like a delivery driver. He put it down.

"I could," he said. "Except you owe me a tea, and I haven't finished being smug about the lock, and you've a shelf of books sorted by height that I need to hear the justification for."

"Publishers do it that way. It's efficient."

"It's madness and you know it." Stephen sat down on the sofa, tested it, approved. "Also, you said something on the step. About heat. And you said you hadn't decided whether it was a joke, and I've been doing this job long enough to know when someone's leaving a question open on purpose."

Caleb poured the water and did not answer straight away. He stirred the tea, tapped the spoon twice on the mug's rim, and set the whole thing down in front of Stephen with the same care he'd shown the shears.

"Then let me ask it plainly," he said. "What is it you want from this detour? Because I'm forty-one, I live over my work, and I don't do things by accident twice."

Stephen looked at the tea, then at Caleb, and did the thing he did before every exam, which was to decide he was going to win it. "Never been with a man," he said. "That's the honest answer. Twenty-eight years old, six years on an ambulance, and I've never once."

"Thank you for saying it plainly."

"Don't get sentimental. Here's the other half of it. I like learning fast and I hate losing, and I've just got a locked door open with a kettle and a scalpel, so I'm feeling competitive."

"That's the least romantic declaration I've heard in years," Caleb said, sitting down on the sofa with a full inch of careful distance between them. "And somehow it's working on me anyway, which is annoying."

"Good. Annoying is my brand. Ask the cake lady."

"The cake lady left before I arrived, and I'm grateful to her." Caleb turned slightly, knee toward Stephen, and the tea steam rose between them like something out of a worse flat than this one. "Before anything happens, I want to hear you say it. Not hinted, not competitive. Said."

Stephen set his mug down on the one coaster in the room, which was shaped like a linden leaf and almost certainly a joke. "I want to stay. I want to find out what this is. That's the said version."

"Right," said Caleb, and then he leaned in and kissed him, which Stephen had been bracing for and was still not ready for, because a man who arranges books by height apparently also kisses like he's proofreading a document he already loves. Stephen's hand went to Caleb's collar on its own authority. He pulled back an inch. "Hang on. Is this all right, me grabbing you? I should've asked."

"You just did, retroactively, and yes. Ask me again whenever you like. I'll never tire of it."

"Weird answer."

"I'm a funeral director. Certainty is my whole trade." They kissed again, standing now in the hallway because Stephen had stood up for no reason he could name, Caleb's back against the pale wood wall, the light still off, which made everything feel like a rumor. Stephen kept cataloguing, because that was how his brain worked. Caleb's jaw had more texture than any woman's he'd kissed. His hands were