“So if she can tell the call-handler that her spare key is at number thirty-four, how come she can’t just phone number thirty four and get her neighbour to let us in?”

“Maybe the call’s from Careline?”

Careline are a faceless entity, a telephone service accessible by pulling a cord, or pressing a panic button. Their voices come, mechanical and shouty, preceded by a squawking tone, through speakers in the corner of bedrooms, halls, kitchens.

We shout at the plaques on the wall when our patients contact them, a remote and sterile system for caring for the elderly.

I leave Milhouse standing in the street while I nip over to the front door of 34. Her neighbour across the road at 31 is, apparently, in some distress, having phoned three nines. Before we can treat her, we need to get into the house.

I ring the bell.

Brring.

Nothing.

Granted, it’s late. Folk’ll be in their beds.

Brrrrrrrring.

Nada.

Please don’t be deaf…or if you are, please sleep with a hearing aid in.

Brrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnggggggg.

And just for good measure, some letterbox action.

Kerflackaflackaflacka.

Beat.

Beat.

Soft! What light from yonder window breaks? It is the East and….

Oh.

Curlers. Squinty eyes at net curtains.

The window opens.

“Who is it?”

“It’s the ambulance service, ma’am.”

“Who?”

“The AMBULANCE SERVICE. We need to get into number thirty one.”

“Who?”

“WE NEED TO GET….CAN YOU COME TO THE DOOR?”

“Who?”

“CAN YOU COME TO THE DOOR, LOVE?”

“I can’t hear you! I’ll come down.”

I give Milhouse a thumbs up. He nods, shuffling his boots on the icy road, clapping his gloved hands.

Keys, locks.

The door opens.

Ajar.

A chain.

“Who is it?”

I lift my ID up, shine a torch on my face, the badge.

“Ambulance service, ma’am. We need to get into num….”

“Ambulance?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“At this time of night?”

“Yes ma’am, I’m sorry to wake you so late, it’s just tha…”

“What do you want?”

“We need to get into number thirty-one, ma’am. Do you have a spare key?”

“This is number thirty-four.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. The lady in thirty-one said yo…”

“Thirty-one is Jessie, across the road.”

“Yes ma’am. We need to get into Jessie’s house.”

“Is she going to hospital?”

“I don’t know yet, I need to examine her.”

“She lives at thirty-one, over the road.”

“Yes ma…she said on the phone that you had a key. Do you have a key?”

“To her house?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, I do.”

“May we have it? Please?”

“I don’t know…let me call her first and check.”

“I think she might be on the pho….”

But she’s gone from the doorway. I turn to Milhouse and close my eyes, breathe slowly through my nose. He stifles a laugh.

“Eight….nine…..ten.”

Much better.

I try to remind myself that I am a great big bloke, waking up a small, alone lady in the middle of the night and demanding keys to her neighbour’s house. She’s right to be cautious.

Of course, if I WAS a burglar, I’d be a fucking gallous one. Having stolen an ambulance, ambulance uniform and an ambulance technician all to support my ruse of getting a key to access a small two-up-two-down in an Edinburgh suburb.

It’s hardly busting the Louvre, is it?

I think if I was planning to burgle Jessie’s house I’d go for the traditional jemmy-through-the-back-door system.

She hangs up the phone, gives us the key to the house and insists on coming with us, just in case we’re planning on stealing all Jessie’s biscuits.

Inside number 31, we creep through the house in darkness, following her shouting and find her wrapped in a duvet on the bedroom floor. Uninjured, a bit confused and muddled up and pretty rubbish on her feet, she has occasional weepy jags.

“What’s wrong with me?”

We help her into a nightie, give her a hand to walk through to the bathroom and Milhouse and I have a wee conference on the stairs.

“Diabetic?”

“Nope. Blood sugar’s ok.”

“Septic?”

“Doesn’t smell septic, not hot enough.”

“Dementia?”

“Could be. House is pretty slick though and you’d think she’d have people staying with her?”

Jessie totters out of the bathroom, nearly loses her balance and Milhouse catches her. She lifts a hand to his face, clumsily strokes his stubble.

“You’ve lovely…”

We help her down stairs and into the ambulance, her neighbour watches me keenly as I lock the front door behind us. I’m about to let Milhouse know that we’re ready to roll when he leans in close.

“Can you smell vodka on her?”

“Not that I’d noticed.”

He shrugs.

Her conversation en route swings wildly from maudlin to shockingly flirtatious. At A&E I hand her over to a nurse with “This is Jessie, collapse query cause, but I think she could be PFO.”

The nurse pops a breathalyser into Jessie’s mouth.

“Blow.”

She doesn’t try very hard, just exhales gently. Even with a weak breath sample, she blows four times the legal driving limit before we leave her on a trolley to sober up.