After nine: the half of the night this zone is actually good at

A start between nine and eleven, occasionally later. A drink standing up, because several of the women here talk better on their feet. A late table if you have not eaten, and in Soho the kitchens that are still enjoying themselves at half past eleven are easy to name if you know who to ask. Then music, or a walk, or back, and by then you will know which.

Two hours at £500 is the shortest version that makes sense of a late start. Three at £700 is the common one, and a night that keeps going belongs on the ten hour line at £1,800 rather than on a series of extensions.

Tiffany lives four streets from Ronnie Scott's and takes starts from ten onwards; second set, a table near the back, and nowhere else to be. Luna will tell you plainly that nothing good has ever happened to her at six o'clock. Stacy asks for a fixed hour rather than a window and knows which doors in St James's are still open after midnight.

Bianka is no use at six and very good at eleven. Molly will walk the loop through the market streets while the stalls are being packed away, which is ten minutes that most visitors to this city never see.

Soho is nine minutes across and open latest of anywhere in the zone, which is why three of the women on this list live inside it. Nothing in it is far enough away to justify a car. The hotels around Soho Square are four minutes from most of the late rooms and the walk east into WC2 is closer to ten.

Because they live there, a message at nine is realistic for ten, and you will be told straight away when it is not. That is the single biggest practical difference between a late booking here and a late booking anywhere else in London.

Mayfair runs a different kind of late. The shops are lit and empty, the squares are silent, and a walk back through them at one in the morning is one of the better things this city does. The late tables around Burlington Gardens are busy enough to be interesting and quiet enough to hear across, and from most of them it is three minutes to the Albemarle Street hotels and about six to Park Lane.

Luna lives inside the postcode, which puts the gap between a confirmed booking and a knock at your door at under half an hour on a good night.

The desk is staffed overnight, properly, and a message at half past one gets the same answer in the same ten to fifteen minutes as a message at seven. Send the hour, the length, the building and a name or a sentence. What comes back is a woman, a figure in whole pounds and a minute.

Her fee is handed to her in person when she arrives. If the name you asked for is not free at that hour, the reply says so plainly rather than sending somebody else without a word. Booking explains the four lines and the single check, rates prints the ladder, and On The Books tells you who is close to which postcode.