Danielle, companion in Heathrow Terminal 5

The covered walkway from Terminal 5 to its hotel takes about five minutes and Danielle has crossed it in every kind of weather this corner of Middlesex produces. Curvy and 170 cm, she wears her long straight black hair loose, and her brown eyes hold a look rather longer than most people are ready for. At twenty nine she has stopped dressing to impress a lobby: a well cut dress in a dark colour, low gold, a coat over the arm. She moves through a busy atrium as though it were a quiet street.

Composed is the word for her. Delays do not rattle her and neither does a guest who arrives shattered and apologetic about it. She reads properly, paperbacks with broken spines, and will spend twenty minutes arguing about an ending. English is what she speaks and she uses it precisely, leaving pauses where other people reach for filler. Underneath the calm there is a dry streak that most guests find somewhere in the second hour.

Terminal 5 is the easiest address anywhere on this side of London, which is why she takes so many evenings here. The hotel sits at the end of that walkway with a glass atrium and a long bar, so there is somewhere to be that is neither the room nor the terminal. She comes out from South Kensington on the Piccadilly line when the roads are bad, fifty minutes end to end, and by car when they are not. Three hours is the floor on airport nights and her travel counts inside it, so she never arrives already watching a clock.

Walkways, drive times and the hotels west of the runway are set out on the Heathrow Terminal 5 page, and a departure time sent to Hester is all she needs to shape an evening around it.

• Heathrow Terminal 5, TW6 and SL3
• 170 cm, curvy
• Long straight black hair, brown eyes
• Twenty nine, travels out from South Kensington
• Five minute covered walkway from the terminal

For an early departure Hester will usually suggest a longer booking rather than a short evening, so nobody is packing and talking at the same time. Give her the flight time and the hotel and she will do the rest.

Her figures are the desk figures, published in full on rates, and the whole arrangement runs in one thread from the first line to the confirmation. Every frame in the hall is reached from the hall.