Lea, companion in Heathrow Terminal 5

Small and quick, with long wavy auburn hair that refuses to behave and hazel eyes that give away when she finds something funny. Lea is 161 cm and petite, and she dresses with a kind of neatness that survives a wet car park. Early twenties. Belgravia is where she starts the evening, which is about forty minutes from this end of the airport when the motorway is kind and considerably more when it is not, so she leaves early and arrives unflustered.

There is nothing cool or distant about her. She is openly curious, laughs before you have finished the story, and treats an unpromising hotel room as a small project. She talks easily in English, though the kind of evening where two people say very little suits her just as well. Guests with an early departure tend to appreciate that she is calm rather than bright.

The hotel at SL3 0FF carries the terminal in its name and sits out in Colnbrook, which matters: it is a ten minute drive along the western Bath Road, not a walk, and the shuttle takes its time at night. She will tell you that before you book it rather than after. In return you get a big quiet building on the Slough side, a car park instead of a taxiway outside your window, and a genuinely dark room for sleeping in afterwards.

Her Terminal 5 and Colnbrook evenings sit under Heathrow Terminal 5. Tell the desk the hotel name in full, because three of them use the words Terminal 5 and only one is attached to it. Booking covers timings and how she gets there.

She plans the first twenty minutes and lets the rest happen. Out on this side of the airport there is nothing to walk to, so an evening with her is properly indoors: a drink from the bar brought upstairs, the curtains pulled, the heating turned down because hotels out here always overdo it. She talks while she takes her coat off and has usually made you laugh before she sits down.

The middle of the night is her best hour. Colnbrook is quiet after eleven, the flights thin out, and the whole western edge of the airport settles. She is not in a hurry to leave and will not pretend otherwise. If you have a dawn departure she sets your alarm herself and makes a point of being gone before it goes off.