A briefed plus one for the conference floor and the client table

Send Hester the shape of the evening in your first message: who else will be at the table, what you do, what you would rather not be asked about, and the name you would like used. Half a dozen lines is plenty. She passes it on and it is read properly rather than skimmed.

If there is a cover story, keep it simple and keep it true where it can be. The ones that work are dull: a colleague, a friend in from out of town, somebody you know through work. Nobody at a conference dinner interrogates a plus one who is clearly not interested in being the centre of the evening.

Most of them are in the central area. One hotel near Terminals 2 and 3 is close enough to walk to from the terminal itself, which is the only part of Heathrow where a guest can leave the car keys alone entirely. The conference rooms there and along the strip run to a familiar pattern: a reception at seven, a long dinner, and a bar that goes on rather later than anybody planned.

Out at Hayes the hotels are cheaper, quieter and eight minutes from the terminals by train, and a good many company bookings end up there for exactly that reason.

Well, and without effort. She dresses for the room rather than against it, she talks to the people either side of her, and she is capable of an entire evening in which nobody works out that she arrived with you rather than with the company.

She does not drink much at a working dinner. She does not answer questions about your business. If somebody is boring you she will notice before you say anything and move the conversation, which is worth the figure on its own.

The bar, if the evening runs that way, or back upstairs. Plenty of these bookings simply end at the lift with a handshake in front of three colleagues, which is precisely what they were arranged for. The booked length is the booked length either way, and she leaves when it is up.

Margo is the first suggestion: dry, worldly, very hard to shock, and she will tell you if your plan for the evening is a poor one. She is back on the central side at the end of September. Patricia is measured and the right company for a guest who has spent all day being spoken at.

Nancy is thirty and completely at home in a room of strangers. Michelle turns a stiff first fifteen minutes into something easy without anybody noticing how. Cindy is funny without working at it and quietly observant, which is a useful thing to have beside you at a client dinner. The whole roster is in the hall, and the late twenties tag holds several more.

A week if the date is already in your diary. These evenings are easier to place than a same day booking because they are planned, and the desk would rather have the brief early than the night before. Nothing about the arrangement appears on any bill of yours; her fee is handed to her in person when she arrives. The booking page sets out the whole sequence.