It was a really good illustration of why you shouldn’t use the first lie that pops into your head. I climbed into his seat, closed the door, put the ambulance into gear, and off we went.

The London Ambulance Service uses a fleet of Mercedes Sprinter vans, which are just like your standard Sprinter but with about two tons of stuff in the back and the kind of soft suspension designed to avoid killing a patient every time you go over a speed bump.

It’s also got a pile of extra LCD screens, buttons, and switches that I, in the interest of simplicity, just ignored. Which was why we were still doing blues and twos as we sailed past the entrance to the UCH ambulance bay and headed down Gower Street toward the river.

It was about this time, according to the EOC call log, that the paramedic used her airwave to report that her ambulance had been hijacked by an escaped mental patient masquerading as a police officer.

There’s nothing quite like driving an emergency vehicle with a strip of spinners on its roof and a full-sized siren designed to cut through the iPod, car stereo cocoon that most drivers live in and scare random pedestrians back onto the pavements. Moses parting the Red Sea would have felt like I did as I plowed across the junction with High Holborn into Endell Street with a brief moment of déjà vu as I shot down Bow Street and past the scaffolding that marked where they were still repairing the damage done to the Royal Opera House.

It’s easy to get messed up trying to go south from Covent Garden. The roads have all been bollarded and blocked to stop them from becoming traffic rat runs, but I’d spent two years patrolling out of Charing Cross nick so I knew where they were. I did a sharp right into Exeter Street and a sharp left down Burleigh Street, which caused the paramedic in the back to start screaming at me again. Which was uncalled for, since I felt I was finally getting on top of the ambulance’s tricky handling.

“How’s he doing?” I yelled over my shoulder.

“He’s bleeding to death,” she yelled back.