“Consternation?”
“That was the word I used.”
“What the hell are you driving at?”
“Something quite simple. Are Linnet Doyle’s affairs in the perfect order they should be?”
Pennington rose to his feet.
“That’s enough. I’m through.” He made for the door.
“But you will answer my question first?”
Pennington snapped: “They’re in perfect order.”
“You were not so alarmed when the news of Linnet Ridgeway’s marriage reached you that you rushed over to Europe by the first boat and staged an apparently fortuitous meeting in Egypt?”
Pennington came back towards them. He had himself under control once more.
“What you are saying is absolute balderdash! I didn’t even know that Linnet was married till I met her in Cairo. I was utterly astonished. Her letter must have missed me by a day in New York. It was forwarded and I got it about a week later.”
“You came over by the Carmanic, I think you said.”
“That’s right.”
“And the letter reached New York after the Carmanic sailed?”
“How many times have I got to repeat it?”
“It is strange,” said Poirot.
“What’s strange?”
“That on your luggage there are no labels of the Carmanic. The only recent labels of transatlantic sailing are the Normandie. The Normandie, I remember, sailed two days after the Carmanic.”
For a moment the other was at a loss. His eyes wavered.
Colonel Race weighed in with telling effect.
“Come now, Mr. Pennington,” he said. “We’ve several reasons for believing that you came over on the Normandie and not by the Carmanic, as you said. In that case, you received Mr
s. Doyle’s letter before you left New York. It’s no good denying it, for it’s the easiest thing in the world to check up the steamship companies.”
Andrew Pennington felt absentmindedly for a chair and sat down. His face was impassive—a poker face. Behind that mask his agile brain looked ahead to the next move.
“I’ll have to hand it to you, gentlemen. You’ve been too smart for me. But I had my reasons for acting as I did.”
“No doubt.” Race’s tone was curt.
“If I give them to you, it must be understood I do so in confidence.”
“I think you can trust us to behave fittingly. Naturally I cannot give assurances blindly.”
“Well—” Pennington sighed. “I’ll come clean. There was some monkey business going on in England. It worried me. I couldn’t do much about it by letter. The only thing was to come over and see for myself.”
“What do you mean by monkey business?”
“I’d good reason to believe that Linnet was being swindled.”