Archie's Unbelievably Freaky Week (8 page)

‘I think it’s Harry’s,’ said Archie. ‘We had to come to school dressed as characters from a book last week, and he came as James Bond.’

‘I don’t believe it!’ said Mr Halibut. ‘Doesn’t your Head Teacher know that playing with toy guns encourages violence? And from what I’ve heard, you have quite enough violence in this school already.’

‘Do we?’ said Archie.

Mr Halibut lowered his voice before replying. ‘I heard a story,’ he said, ‘that earlier this week, a boy at this school threatened his teacher with a knife!’

‘Oh,
that!
’ said Archie. ‘No, that was just a misunderstanding! I wasn’t really threatening her.’

Mr Halibut stopped in his tracks.

‘You . . . You were the one with the knife?’

‘The trouble was,’ said Archie, ‘that Miss Hurrell thought that
I
thought that she’d murdered my father. I didn’t, of course, it was just a misunderstanding, but then she saw me with the knife, and after she’d seen me with the other body in the car park . . .’

Archie stopped, because he could see that
Mr
Halibut was not listening. He was backing away. Backing away quite fast and, Archie noticed, not looking where he was going. Behind him was a row of cones and a warning sign saying:
BUILDERS AT WORK. KEEP AWAY
! Mr Halibut, however, did not see it.

Archie tried to warn him. ‘Stop, Mr Halibut!’ he said. ‘Please! Stop now!’

But Mr Halibut did not stop. Looking thoroughly frightened, he backed through the barrier of cones and continued moving backwards until he was up against the side of a skip.

‘You need to come away from there, Mr Halibut!’ Archie called. ‘You need to come back towards me.’

He had quite forgotten, as he later told Cyd, that he was still holding the toy gun as he said this, and it was unfortunate that, at just that moment, Miss Roberts, in the classroom behind him, was doing her demonstration of how hydrogen gas, when ignited, makes a very loud
bang
. It was even more unfortunate that, at exactly the same time, one of the builders tossed a bit of concrete into the skip, which bounced up and grazed the side of Mr Halibut’s head.

To understand why all these things together led to the accident that followed, you have to imagine how they looked from Mr Halibut’s point of view.

Horrified at discovering that the boy who was taking him round the school was the same child who had, apparently, threatened a teacher with a knife earlier in the week, he now found this same boy was pointing a gun at him. He had thought the gun was a toy but, as Mr Halibut stood with his back to the skip, there was a loud bang and something hit the side of his head.

Putting his hand up to his temple, he found blood on his fingers and, perhaps understandably, came to the conclusion that he had been shot.

Before Archie could shoot him again he turned and, in blind panic, raced into the car park where Mr James, the plumber, was carrying in the new toilet for the girls’ lavatory. Head down and sprinting for dear life, Mr Halibut ran straight into it with enough force to jam his head halfway down the bowl.

He sank to the ground, still with the toilet bowl on his head, and lay there, not moving. ‘They’ve taken him off in the ambulance,’ said Mr Gunn, when he got back to his office. ‘There was quite a crowd in the end, watching.’

‘Did they get the toilet bowl off his head?’ asked Archie.

‘They’re going to do that at the hospital,’ said the Head, ‘but you needn’t worry. I’m sure he’s going to be fine, even if he did lose quite a lot of blood.’ He looked at Archie. ‘Are you all right yourself?’

Some of the blood Mr Halibut had lost had wound up down the front of Archie’s shirt. The cut on the Inspector’s head had been bleeding heavily when Archie ran over to try and help.

‘I’m OK,’ said Archie, ‘but . . . but I’m really sorry.’

‘Nothing for you to be sorry about,’ said Mr Gunn. ‘None of it was your fault, was it?’

‘But Mr Halibut’s going to be so angry, isn’t he?’ said Archie. ‘Which means he’ll give the school a really bad report and—’

‘As it happens, Mr Halibut won’t be giving any reports in the near future,’ said Mr Gunn. ‘He’ll be in hospital for some time, so I’ve arranged for our inspection to be done by Mr Stevens. He’s a good man. Very sensible.’

Archie was relieved to hear it, but he still felt bad about Mr Halibut. ‘I can’t help thinking,’ he said, ‘that if I hadn’t been there, probably nothing would have happened.’

‘Maybe not,’ said Mr Gunn, ‘but I don’t think we should worry too much about it.’

Certainly, Mr Gunn did not seem to be too worried. He sat at his desk, leaned back in his chair and there was even the trace of a smile on his face as gazed out of the window.

‘Here,’ he said, and he spun round and pointed to the glass bowl of sweets on his desk. ‘Have a lolly.’

And then, to Archie’s astonishment, he added. ‘In fact . . . have two!’

‘I don’t believe it!’ said Cyd, as she and Archie walked home at the end of the day. ‘He gave you
two
lollies?’

You had to have done something very special to be given a lolly from the bowl on Mr Gunn’s desk. It was a bit like a soldier being awarded the Victoria Cross, and nobody had
ever
been told to take two.

‘I thought he was going to be really cross with me,’ said Archie, passing one of the lollies to his friend, ‘but he wasn’t. He told me not to worry about it.’

‘We missed everything, up in the classroom,’ said Cyd, sadly. ‘We didn’t see the accident. We didn’t even see the ambulance.’ She sighed. ‘A man with a toilet on his head running round the car park, and we missed it all.’