Auburn and red: three companions, three different corners

Lea is petite at 161 cm and twenty three, sweet natured and quick to laugh, and she has learned the gate times at the park because an hour among the old stable blocks before dinner changes the shape of a whole evening. She comes out to Cranford from Belgravia on the Piccadilly line, which is the right line for that end of the road and no use at all further west.

She can make a plain hotel room feel like somewhere you chose rather than somewhere you washed up in. It takes her about a minute: one lamp on, the overhead light off, a chair turned to face the window.

Luna is curvy at 171 cm and twenty two, and she prefers the airport hotels that sit far enough out to stop feeling like a connection. She dresses in colour where everybody else out here wears grey, she is impossible to embarrass, and she is unusually good with guests who arrive tired and defensive and expecting to be handled.

She does not do brief, which works out well, since nothing on this side of London runs shorter than three hours anyway. Her pick is a low key hotel near junction four with a bar that stays open later than the road outside would suggest.

Patricia is slim at 172 cm and twenty eight, and she takes Harmondsworth first, where a barn six hundred years old stands a mile and a half from a live runway and nobody in the village appears to find that strange. She is the most measured of the three and the best company for a guest who has spent the whole day being spoken at.

Three hours is £700 for any of the three, with her travel out from town inside the figure rather than beside it. Four hours takes in a proper dinner at £900, and a full night is £1,800. Every rung is printed on the rates page in whole pounds, and the fee is handed to her in person when she arrives, in the first minute.

Her time and her company are the whole of what is being booked, at every length.

Lea also stands under petite, Luna under curvaceous, and Patricia under both statuesque and slim and slender. By age, Lea and Luna are in the early twenties and Patricia in the late twenties.

All three take the long, plain, unhurried sort of booking described on the unhurried evening. Send Hester the hotel and the hour, and she will tell you which of them is actually free that night rather than which of them she would like to sell you.