"The moments after Madeleine disappeared
Talking from her mother's home in Leatherhead, Surrey, she told the Daily Mail: "I was in the apartment less than five minutes after they found that Madeleine had gone. When we were coming out we saw Kate and she was screaming: 'They've taken her, they've taken her!'
"I was standing right in front of her outside the apartment's back door, in the alleyway. I was very close to her. It might not have been the first thing she said. But she definitely said it. I was one of three Mark Warner staff who saw her shouting it. They have all given statements to the Portuguese police saying that."
In terms of the timeline, this is a very interesting quote. She says she was in the McCanns apartment ''less than five minutes after they found that Madeleine had gone''.
She said previously that the woman who came to collect her child from the evening creche, from whom she first found out a child was missing, arrived just before 10.00pm.
So, by the time the woman reached the creche, according to Pennington's account, a chain of events had already taken place:
Kate had discovered Madeleine missing; she had searched the apartment herself; she had run to the tapas restaurant to raise the alarm with Gerry and their friends and she had returned to the apartment and waited for it to be thoroughly searched by Gerry and their friends.
There would then have been a passage of time before the man, presumably Gerry, had gone out into the streets shouting out Maddie's name (which incidentally, the McCanns have insisted they never called her - it was always 'Madeleine').
And then, finally, there would have been a pasage of time for the woman to arrive at the creche, collect her child and then tell the staff what she had heard outside.
That whole process would surely have taken longer than five minutes to complete, and finish, before 10.00pm. Pennington's statement suggests the alarm was actually raised sometime well before 10:00pm, but this would then have major repercussions on the McCanns stated timeline. Indeed, it would make the raising of the alarm at 9:30pm, as was stated in some early reports, seem much more likely."
That actually makes it more difficult to be at the apartment in less than five minutes after the alarm is raised.