Angelika, companion in Heathrow Terminal 5

Black hair, long and straight past the shoulder blades, brown eyes that find you before you have finished getting up from the chair by the window. Angelika is 172 cm and athletic, a runner's frame rather than a poser's, and she crosses a hotel floor at one speed regardless of who is watching. The dress is dark and uncreased, chosen because it survives a car and a lift and still reads properly under the low lamps of an airport bar. Mid twenties. Her London base is Mayfair, which matters less out here than the fact that she sets off for the perimeter road while you are still at the belt.

Directness suits jet lag, and she is direct. No performance at the door, no slow warm up, a hello and then a real question while the kettle is still going. She works in English, plainly, and the dry turn of phrase shows up about ten minutes in. Reading people quickly is the whole skill on a layover, and she can tell inside a sentence whether you want to talk about your week or never hear it mentioned again.

Evenings at Terminal 5 are simple and she prefers them that way. TW6 2GD is the one building here you can reach on foot with a case, five minutes from arrivals and all of it under cover, so nobody stands in the rain waiting for a car. She will meet you in the bar off the atrium, or upstairs if your body clock is already three hours past the room. From this end of the airport the perimeter road puts Colnbrook and the western Bath Road ten minutes away, and she knows which of those runs is quick at nine and slow at seven.

Her nights at this end of the airport sit under Heathrow Terminal 5. Give the desk your terminal, the hour you want her there, and your room number once you have it. If you are still in the air, the flight number does the same job. Booking explains the rest.

A Terminal 5 night runs on the clock and she respects the clock. If you are down at seven she would rather arrive at nine, when the shower has happened and the flight has worn off, than at eight while you are still hunting for the right adaptor. The first half hour stays quiet: one drink, the day unpicked in the order it actually happened, shoes off somewhere in the middle of it.

What follows depends on what the flight took out of you. Some nights that means dinner downstairs and a long conversation about nothing useful. Some nights it means the room, two lamps on, and the last departures going out over Stanwell in the background. She looks at the time once, near the end, and never in a way you feel.