The plane landed at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 at something like six in the morning. Since her immigration status had become impossible to make sense of, she was met, at the top of the jetway, by a man in a uniform and a man in a suit. She had always read of people being "whisked through" certain formalities, but this was the first time she had ever been personally whisked and she had to admit that it had its charms. Particularly when you were hungover and bleeding. In order to get from Terminal 5’s gates to Immigration and Customs, it was necessary to descend a prodigious stack of escalators, beginning well above ground level and terminating deep below. There was a place, about halfway along, where an escalator deposited the newly arrived passengers on a landing that happened to coincide with street level; as you executed a U-turn to get on the next, you could look out through glass doors and walls at a road with cars and trucks streaming along it. Uniformed personnel were forever stationed before those glass doors to make sure that everyone coming down those escalators kept going down into the levels where they were to be processed.