A room call in E14, usually at your door inside the hour

Most of these addresses come from a short list. Westferry Circus holds the riverside hotel at the western tip of the estate. West India Quay has one of its own, backed onto the old sugar warehouses with a DLR platform overhead. Marsh Wall carries two more, in sight of each other across the water at South Quay. Further down the Isle of Dogs there is the large block facing Millwall Dock.

This desk has no arrangement with any of them and never will. They come up because she has crossed those floors before, so she already knows which lift wants a key and which entrance is still open at two in the morning.

Half of these addresses turn out to be flats rather than hotel rooms: the apartment blocks on Marsh Wall, the newer buildings at Wood Wharf, the short lets above the station. Almost all of them keep somebody on a desk downstairs and a lift that refuses to move without a key. None of that causes trouble if the arrangement is known in advance, so write one line about how visitors are handled where you are staying. She will give a first name at reception if that is what your building expects, or stay outside and message you from the door instead. Either way, nobody downstairs is told anything further.

£250 buys an hour, which is the right length after a day that went badly: a drink, a view you stopped noticing weeks ago, and a conversation with no numbers anywhere in it. £400 buys ninety minutes and leaves room for something to be sent up. £500 buys two hours, which is what most people settle on in the end, since there is time in it to go down to the water and come back with nobody watching a clock. The clock starts when she reaches your door, not when she left her own, and every rung above these is on rates.

She knocks, comes in, and the coat goes over the back of a chair rather than onto a hook, because nobody needs a ceremony made of a coat. The first ten minutes are the drink and the window. She will usually ask which of the lit floors across the dock belongs to your employer, and the answer tends to be funnier than it should be.

After that the hour is yours and nobody announces its stages. Five minutes before the end she says so once, plainly, so that nothing stops in the middle of a sentence. That is also the moment to ask for a second hour if you want one. She checks her own diary there and then instead of promising something the desk would later have to withdraw, and the extra time costs the gap between one rung and the next, nothing more.

Angelika needs about fifteen minutes on the Elizabeth line from Mayfair and is dressed before she replies. Michelle lives in Chelsea, works E14 almost exclusively and rarely takes more than a few minutes to come back. Molly asks for three things only: the date, the hour and where you are staying. Lucy is at her best when the plan is small and is said to be small. Jasmin prefers a start after eight, which makes her the easiest name on the board at half past nine. The other twenty three are on the desk.

Meetings run over and aircraft sit on stands. To shift the start, write in the same chat. Give three hours of warning or better and nothing at all is owed, and Maude will say plainly whether the new hour still works. If the hotel has moved you, send the new room number and she has it before she reaches the lift. She waits fifteen minutes past the agreed time; past that the evening is rebooked rather than squeezed into what is left of it. The five steps are on booking.