 Whole Story Quest audiobooks presents Is There a Doctor Here, An Omnibus by Alex Rudd, Narrated by Fraser Blacksland. Part 1 London Callout Chapter 1 The First Call Hello doc, fancy a trip to deepest Hackney? It's just gone 3am in late February, it's warm and dry in my surgery and looks horribly wet and windy outside. I've just made myself a coffee and I've got a big backlog of phone calls to return, but it looks like I'm going to Hackney. This is better be good Steve, I'll get my bag and see you in the car. Five minutes later, I've downed one coffee and put a second one in a travel cup. I've logged off my computer, told the nurses I'm going on a house call and headed out to the hospital car park. I'm wearing black cargo trousers, a dark blue jumper and a waterproof hiking jacket. I could probably pass for a burglar, an off-duty copper or a tourist with a bad case of insomnia. In fact, I'm an out of hours doctor, part of a team of half a dozen or so GPs, nurse practitioners and drivers that takes over this set of empty rooms in the London Medical Centre from six in the evening till eight the following morning. Steve is one of our drivers, at this particular centre they can be the first to know when one of the GPs needs to do a house call, if they're hanging around by the phones and printers they'll find out who needs a doctor and where. They then walk down the corridor to see whether any of their favourites are free. So, where are we off to? I asked Steve as we cut across some empty roads and head north. I was brought up in Blackburn, so Steve knows London a lot better than I do. He used to be a black cab driver, he ran a private hire show for service for a while and now he earns a decent amount driving doctors around four nights a week. He's always got an opinion or a story, tonight is no exception. Last time I took someone up here it was the night after a riot, looked like bleeding Beirut, bins in the road, police everywhere, whole gangs of idiots roaming around trying to karate kick wing mirrors and acting like animals on bleeding acid, he tells me of the relish. Rain is sweeping across the windscreen and the wind's slam is against the cars we wait at one particularly exposed red light. It looks like one of those nights when no one will hear you scream. In the olden days GPs doing house calls were easy targets, especially in tough parts of town. We travelled on our own and low life reckoned we had plenty of juicy kit in our bags, prescription drugs and shiny kit and lots of other goodies you could use yourself or sell on the street. Hospital school is full of tall tales of doctors lured to non-existent addresses and mugged for their medicines. As it turns out, the address we're looking for tonight is in one of the more posh parts of Hackney. Sample complete, ready to continue?