“I’m Karis Edwards, here for my manicure.”
“Good morning,” said Eirlys. “Penny herself will be looking after you this morning. I’ll let her know you’re here.”
A moment later Penny emerged from the manicure room, greeted Karis, and walked with her down the hall.
“Just give me your coat and we’ll get started,” said Penny, pointing to the client’s chair. She handed Karis’s coat to a young woman in a pink smock. “This is Bethan,” Penny said. Bethan set a bowl of fragrant, warm water on the white towel in front of Karis and Penny gently dipped her client’s fingertips in the bowl.
“Is the water temperature all right? Not too hot, I hope.”
Karis nodded. “It’s fine.”
“So,” said Penny conversationally, “is your program sorted for your concert?”
“It’s just a few songs in a small town,” said Karis, with an indifferent shrug. “Not sure it rates being called a concert.”
Penny struggled to contain herself. “Well, we’ve all gone to a lot of work to put this event on,” she said. “Especially after the original organizer died. And the people in our small town have paid good money to hear you sing.” She added a slightly icy emphasis to the words “small town,” which Karis either did not notice or chose to ignore. Oh, man, this is going to be heavy going, thought Penny. Over the years she’d become very good at reading body language and Karis was stiff and closed. Penny had learned that sometimes the right question could really break the ice. “Do you have a pet?” worked wonders with a new client who would immediately break into a broad smile and tell Penny all about her amazing cat who kept the household in stitches with its clever antics and had its own channel on YouTube. But she suspected it would take more than cat talk to connect in any meaningful way with the woman sitting across from her.
When clients were uncommunicative Penny tried to sense if they preferred to have their manicure in silence or if they wanted to chat and just needed a bit of drawing out. She wasn’t sure what Karis wanted, so grasping for conversation, commented, “That’s a pretty ring.” Karis pulled her left hand out of the soaking water and manipulated the ring between her middle and small fingers to centre the purple-coloured stones. “Thank you. It was my mother’s.”
Penny placed the hand she had been working on back in the soaking water and picked up Karis’s other hand. She began shaping the nails and silence once again settled over them, broken only by the whispery sound of the emery board brushing against a fingernail. When she’d finished the filing, she looked over her shoulder to speak to Bethan, who was pretending to busy herself sorting bottles of nail polish that Eirlys always kept perfectly arranged. “Bethan, would you mind helping Karis choose her polish?”
“I think a bright red,” Karis said, looking up. Bethan pulled four bottles and showed them to her. “That one, I think,” Karis said, pointing at one.
Penny picked up a pair of sterile clippers and began trimming around her fingernails, letting bits of discarded skin drop onto the towel. When she had finished both hands, she rolled up the towel and handed it to Bethan who exchanged it for a fresh one. Penny arranged this over the table, running her hands over it to smooth it out, gave Karis a reassuring smile, and began applying a base coat as Bethan left the room. Bethan carried the towel to the reception area where Eirlys held open a plastic bag. She placed the towel in the evidence bag, sealed it, and initialed it in the appropriate box. She handed her smock to Eirlys, thanked her, and left the Spa. Within the hour, the towel was being unrolled in the North Wales Police Service lab and the bits of skin it contained prepared for DNA testing.
Penny applied the final strokes of top coat and then sat back as Karis held up her hands. “Thank you,” she said. “They look very nice.”
That’s high praise coming from you, thought Penny. “You’re most welcome,” she said. “We’ll see you tonight at the dress rehearsal.”