A COLD November wind swirls down the narrow west Cork road as we approach his gate. He has told us over the phone to "beep once when you get to the gate and I will come out to meet you".

His long-term partner's yellow cottage is vaguely visible from the road when we arrive. The gate has been decorated with rows of bamboo sticks to conceal the house.

Upon our arrival, he comes walking down the short driveway. After opening the padlock and chain on the gate he greets us with an apprehensive smile.

He agrees only to pose for photographs on the quiet country road. He maintains that over the last decade he has been accused of courting media publicity so a photograph is all he will agree to.

Tall in stature, he is dressed smartly in a white shirt and red tie, a long green trench coat, beige trousers and a pair of shiny brown shoes.

He is accompanied by his Scotch terrier dog 'Bob' and wants the photographs taken quickly as the skies are threatening to pour rain on an extremely overcast afternoon.

Whether or not he has been the victim of a campaign to have his name tarnished, it is hard to argue that Ian Bailey has not lived in a nightmare for the past decade. The former freelance journalist has lost that profession forever. He now grows vegetables at his rural home while he and his partner Jules Thomas have a stall in Schull farmers' market every Sunday.

Bailey sells pizza and freshly baked bread at the stall while Thomas, an accomplished artist, sells her watercolour paintings.

There is mixed opinion on Bailey in Schull, with one lady saying she crosses the street every time she sees him as she cannot bring herself to look at him in the eye.

A local publican tells us, "I believe in due process and as far as I'm concerned he's innocent until proven guilty in the courts. He comes in here from time to time and nobody bothers him."

In the Black Sheep pub, a number of Jules Thomas's paintings adorn the walls . . . for sale with price tags of over 500. So great is the demand for her artwork she can barely reproduce the west Cork countryside images fast enough.

Back at the house Bailey shares with his long-term lover, his decision to pose for the rare photographs has coincided with the news . . . a few hours earlier . . . that the state would not be contesting his application for the return of diaries, notebooks and his press card that were seized from him by gardai.

While Bailey does not want to address the media about it, his solicitor, Frank Buttimer, claims that the state's decision is confirmation that the state has abandoned all interest in Bailey as a potential suspect for the murder of 38-year-old Parisian Sophie Toscan du Plantier, two days before Christmas, 10 years ago.

Tranquil retreat Sophie Toscan du Plantier had first come to Ireland in the early 1990s and eventually settled on a house in west Cork, after looking for a home to match her independent spirit. Her beautiful two-storey cottage, bought in 1992 and, by a conservative current valuation, worth over 1m, became a tranquil home from home for the film producer over half a decade.

Sophie flew into Cork airport on the morning of Friday 20 December.

To get around the rugged local roads she had pre-arranged to rent a new model Ford Fiesta. It was already a familiar route from the airport to her home overlooking Fastnet Rock. She stopped off at a Texaco filling station in Ballydehob, buying a packet of kindling to start the fire in her sitting room and heat the house against the December chill.

Later in the day, just before 4pm, she drove into the centre of Schull village and had dinner at the Courtyard Bar and Restaurant. When she got home again, she made a quick phone call to Josie Hellen, a local married woman who lived with her husband just a few minutes' walk down the hill from her house. Josie acted as caretaker of Sophie's house during the owner's long absences on the continent.

The next morning, Saturday 21 December, Sophie drove her silver grey Fiesta into Schull again. She withdrew money from a cashpoint in the village and bought groceries.

That Saturday was a busy day for any shop owner so close to Christmas, with last-minute present-hunters dashing around trying to fill the last corners of their Christmas stockings. Marie Farrell was working away as normal in her small clothes shop in the centre of the village, not knowing that the events of that day . . . and indeed the following 48 hours . . . would change the course of her hitherto unremarkable life forever. Marie Farrell's next hours would inexorably link the diminutive and bespectacled Longford-born shopkeeper's life story to that of the petite French beauty.

At around 3pm, Sophie came into Marie Farrell's shop to browse through the racks, but left without buying anything. Farrell says she did not know then who Sophie was, and that she paid little attention to the blonde-haired woman's presence in the shop. It would be later, in more tragic circumstances, that the shop owner would look back on that briefest of encounters and realise who it was that had entered her premises.

Around the same time that Saturday, Farrell says she spotted an oddlooking fellow across the street from her shop. The man wore a long coat and was a fairly wretched-looking individual from her observation.

Where this man went to immediately after this sighting is unknown.

One of the many people milling about the village that Saturday afternoon was another 'outsider' . . . a tall and distinctively raven-haired Englishman who had moved to the area some years before and settled into a long-term relationship with a woman living locally; freelance journalist Ian Bailey.

After leaving the clothes shop and touring a few more retail cubby-holes for last minute pre-Christmas purchases, Sophie had her tea at a waterfront bar in Crookhaven.

Murder On the morning of Monday 23 December, Sophie's battered body was found lying at the bottom of the laneway leading up to her house. The scene where she lay was one of utter horror. Her final moments were unquestionably brutal and brief. Her head had been smashed with what could only have been a large rock or slab. Patches of blood were left on the heavy wroughtiron gate at the entrance to her driveway. Sophie was wearing only a nightshirt and a pair of lace-tied boots.

The scene outside suggested that a fleeing woman had been chased and bludgeoned. But the set-up indoors in her white-plastered cottage was contradictory. There was no apparent sign of any struggle having taken place.

Oddly, two chairs had been pulled up to a radiator where it seemed the host and a guest may have sat themselves to get warm. Two wine glasses were taken down but left placed apart on the mantelpiece and drainer . . . one with wine in it. The solid-fuel fire in the sitting room had been alight the night before but had not been added to since.

In a macabre find, a bilingual edition of Yeats' poetry lay open on Sophie's bed . . . at a poem called 'Death'. It begins: "Nor dread nor hope attend, A dying animalf" As gardai stood beside the bloody corpse, a short distance away Marie Farrell was getting up from her bed. Farrell probably felt she had good reason to be pleased with herself. She had crawled into the marital bed that she shared with her husband Chris at sometime past 4am in the early hours of that morning, after enjoying a night of adventure.

Earlier on the previous day, Sunday 22 December, Marie Farrell went to Cork on a business trip to see how things were going at a small city retail outlet that she and her husband had a financial interest in. She spent most of the day in Cork city, before returning to Schull in her small van later that evening.

She told her husband that she was going out to meet with friends, leaving the couple's house again at around 10pm. What Farrell hadn't told her husband Chris was that she had arranged a rendezvous with a man with whom she had been in a relationship some years previously, and who she had accidentally bumped into while on one of her trips to Cork city.

Precisely what she and the man were meeting to discuss that evening remains only known to the pair . . . and he has since died . . . but Farrell insists that there was no sexual motive to their rendezvous.

Farrell and her former boyfriend drove in separate vehicles and met at a designated gathering point . . . a local hotel car park. Farrell then got into the man's car and the pair drove slowly to a local beach, where the couple chatted some more.

Later that night, Farrell and her companion drove around the quiet country roads between Goleen, Schull and Toormore. They drove near Kealfadda Bridge, situated at a three-road junction of sorts at the base of the mountain road up to the top of Toormore. It was after 3am in the morning of Monday 23 December.

Driving along the road with her male friend, Farrell spotted a man walking alone. He seemed to her to look like the man she had seen the day before standing across from her shop.

Witness?

News of Sophie's horrific death spread slowly through Schull and Goleen villages and their rural environs on the afternoon and evening of Monday 23 December. The following day's media reports emphasised one precise fact: that Sophie Toscan du Plantier had died from an act of brutal force . . . her head, literally, smashed open.

It was only in the two days after the killing that Marie Farrell grasped that she had, in fact, seen the murder victim just two days before her body was discovered.

Without much thought, Marie Farrell contacted gardai at Bandon on Christmas Day. She told detectives that she had seen the odd-looking man in the long overcoat across from her shop on the Saturday that Sophie had also been in Schull shopping. She also told them that she saw this person subsequently at Airhill, near Sophie's house, at some time around 7am on the morning of Sunday, 22 December, while on her way to Cork city.

Almost from the very start, the information that Farrell gave to detectives appeared to warp and transform from one thing into another with dramatic emphasis.

In the first statement that she gave to detectives, on the day after St Stephen's Day 1996, she said the man she had seen was near enough average height; approximately, five feet, 10 inches tall. Ian Bailey stands considerably taller, reaching well over six-foot two inches tall.

Crucially, it is understood that Farrell was shown a video by gardai two days after her initial statement. The officers wanted her to look at the video tape and tell them if she could spot the odd-looking man in the footage.

Farrell looked at the tape and told them that, as far as she was concerned, the man she had told them about was not captured on the video.

It is understood that Ian Bailey featured prominently in the tape, which had been privately filmed by a third party at a gathering held on Christmas Day at the Pier in Schull.

But Farrell's next move was to place her on a collision course with gardai. She had seen a man, some man, near Kealfadda bridge at around 3am on the morning of 23 December. But she had not told gardai of this sighting. She faced a dilemma: if she told gardai that she had made this 3am sighting, then, she feared, the nature of the extra-marital rendezvous that she was engaged in that late night and early morning might become known to her husband Rude awakening Farrell made an anonymous call to the Garda Confidential Line, on 10 January 1997. She gave a false name and told the listening officer that she had made the 3am sighting. Meanwhile, press reports began to emerge suggesting that the killer may have been based locally.

One such front-page report, published in this newspaper in the last week of December 1996, and written by a freelance journalist based in west Cork, suggested just such a development. The story quoted garda sources who said they were "mystified" at the killing. It was just five days after Sophie's body had been found but already there was an emphasis placed on the strain that existed in Sophie Toscan du Plantier's relationship with her husband, with the story suggesting that she and Daniel were close to separation in the days preceding her arrival in Cork. The author's name:

Eoin Bailey . . . a gaelic version frequently used by freelance reporter Ian Bailey.

Within days of Marie Farrell's anonymous telephone call to the Garda Confidential Line, a special report on RTE's Crimeline programme sought out the mystery woman who had placed the call and asked her to make contact again.

Farrell called the confidential line again on 17 January, a few days after the programme aired, again anonymously. She reiterated what she had seen at Kealfadda Bridge at around 3am on 23 December. But she insisted that she would not be coming forward to identify herself for personal reasons.

Without ever suspecting that she would have to put her neck on the line, Farrell was in for a rude awakening. A day or two after she made the second call to the confidential line, she was in her shop when a garda walked in. She was told that the detectives knew that she was the mysterious person who had placed the anonymous call. In the days to follow, the details of what she told gardai were to change dramatically. She gave another statement, on 22 January 1997. Crucially, the physical description of the man that she saw standing opposite her Schull shop, exactly a month earlier, had changed dramatically. He went from being around five feet 10 inches tall to being, in her words, a very tall man.

In an interview with gardai a week after the second statement, she crucially alleged that Ian Bailey was the person she had seen on both occasions; opposite her shop and then near Kealfadda bridge at some time after 7am the following day, later clarifying her second statement to add this identification of Bailey.

Arrest While intense efforts were being made by gardai to find any information that might point to Bailey's involvement in the brutal killing, equally intense machinations were going on behind the scene at diplomatic level between the highest level of Irish and French government officials.

Sophie was well known in the highest echelons of French society and President Jacques Chirac, a personal friend, made a plea to the Irish authorities to catch her killer.

The then minister for justice, Nora Owen, met her French counterpart, Jacques Touban, who was also a personal friend of Sophie, to discuss progress in the investigation. The exchange took place at a meeting of EU ministers in the Netherlands on 6 February 1997.

Four days later, Ian Bailey was arrested and brought to Bandon garda station. It was the start of a decade-long conflict that Bailey would engage in with gardai and the media, in which he would be painted, almost without question, as the only significant candidate for consideration as the key murder suspect.

Not long after the murder, Bailey gave a lift home to a then 14-year-old schoolboy, Malachi Reed. During Bailey's libel action, the youth claimed that after he asked Bailey how his work was going, Bailey stunned him by saying everything was "fine, until I went up there with a rock and bashed her f***ing brains in". Bailey denied that this exchange of words occurred.

The Shelleys, Rosie and Richie, were also friends of Ian and Jules, until an incident on new year's eve 1998. After drinking in a local pub, the two couples went back for more drinks to Bailey and Thomas's house. During the libel action, Richie Shelley alleged that, when he and his wife decided to leave, Bailey, who was sleeping, allegedly awoke and started to cry before saying to Richie Shelley: "I did it. I did it. . . I went too far." Bailey did not deny the outburst but insists that what he actually said to Shelley was that "they", namely the press and gardai, were saying that this is what Bailey had done.

Bailey says he did not know of Sophie until she was found dead. But another local man, Alfie Lyons, claimed in court that he was "90%" certain that he had introduced Ian Bailey and Sophie Toscan du Plantier over a year before the murder, in June 1995. Bailey denied that this happened.

The Paris correspondent for the Observer newspaper, Paul Webster, claimed in court that a man purporting to be Ian Bailey rang him before his arrest and claimed he had met du Plantier. Webster alleged that Bailey described the dead woman as "more of an acquaintance than a friend". Bailey insists that all he said was that he "knew of" the dead woman.

Bailey had scratches to his body in the days after the killing but explained these as having being the result of his tussle with a turkey and a Christmas tree. But it is Bailey's alleged movements, and the events of the day that Sophie Toscan du Plantier's body was found, which raise most questions in relation to what he knew and, crucially, how he allegedly knew it.

Bailey claims that the first he heard of the killing was when Eddie Cassidy, a journalist with the Examiner newspaper, rang him just before 2pm on the day the body was found. Cassidy later gave evidence in court that he didn't know at this stage that a murder had occurred, and said that he thought it may have been a hit-and-run and that he did not know that the victim was a French national.

Furthermore, in the course of the libel trial, several locals alleged that, on the morning of 23 December, Bailey and Jules Thomas made references to the occurrence of a murder. Local Schull shopkeeper Caroline Leftwich claimed that Bailey phoned her on the morning Sophie's body was found, saying he couldn't keep an appointment as he was reporting on a murder case. Bailey and Thomas denied this.

Court of public opinion THE information provided to gardai, over a long period of time, seemed to amount to a considerable circumstantial case against one clear suspect.

Farrell's evidence was overwhelmingly the strongest. Yet despite two separate garda investigations . . . including a later review by the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation (NBCI) . . . the office of the director of public prosecutions (DPP) did not bring a prosecution in relation to the murder.

There was no significant physical evidence from the scene. Opposition TDs complained in the Dail that the then state pathologist Prof John Harbison did not attend the scene for over 24 hours. For all that time, Sophie's corpse lay exposed to the harsh wintry elements with only a light plastic tarpaulin covering her.

However strong Farrell's statements appeared, the DPP clearly did not think them so and the other witness accounts were not collectively strong enough to support a homicide charge.

When Bailey sued a number of newspapers over their coverage of the murder investigation, it was the first time that any of the witnesses, including both Farrell and Bailey, had set foot in court in relation to Sophie's death.

That December 2003 libel trial gripped the nation in an unprecedented fashion. During the course of the 10-day hearing, which resembled a murder trial, it emerged that Bailey has a history of violence against women. It emerged that he beat Jules Thomas in Cork city in 1993 in what she described as "a moment of alcoholic madness", and she ended up in hospital.

There were other beatings, including one in the car in west Cork that left Thomas with horrific facial injuries. Bailey partially severed her lip and tore off clumps of her scalp. He did not deny the horrendous violence.

He insisted that it did not follow that this made him a killer. It occurred, both he and Jules Thomas said, at a time when he drank a lot. Bailey insisted he was now a changed man. While Thomas had twice got barring orders against Bailey, she attended court every day during the libel trial and still lives with him. A full rehearing of the libel trial is expected to commence in February of next year.

Sensational twist However, the most dramatic volte-face in Irish criminal history was yet to come. On 18 April 2005 . . . almost eight-and-a-half years after the murder . . . Marie Farrell telephoned Bailey's Cork-based solicitor, Frank Buttimer.

The pair met at his office on Washington Street on 10 May, some three weeks later. Buttimer sat Farrell down and, in the course of a lengthy interview, she gave a shocking new version of her alleged sightings of the lawyer's client around the time of Sophie's murder.

Farrell effectively admitted that everything she had said previously in relation to Bailey . . . in her formal garda statements, to the media and in court . . . was false and deliberately misleading. Farrell was now alleging that she had informed senior Dublin-based gardai back in 2000 that her statements placing Bailey at the bridge were totally untrue.

Crucially, she insisted that she had been coerced into making the statement and into repeating it. She claimed that gardai became aware of her extra-marital relationship and that she felt pressurised into identifying Ian Bailey as the man she saw three times between 21-23 December 1996 . . .

despite her alleged protestations privately to gardai that the man she saw was definitely not the English journalist.

The first effect of her u-turn was the cancellation by Sophie's family . . .

the Bouniols . . . of a Circuit Court civil action against Ian Bailey, which they had hoped would spur new evidence in the probe.

Almost immediately, Buttimer sent letters to both justice minister Michael McDowell and garda commissioner Noel Conroy, outlining the remarkable new claims. An investigation team, under assistant garda commissioner Ray McAndrew, was ordered by Conroy to forensically probe the new allegations that Bailey was wrongfully targeted by gardai as the chief suspect.

Damning new revelations?

McAndrew's report is currently being finalised and is expected to be presented to Conroy and McDowell within weeks. And some of the information that forms the investigative dossier is astonishing, the Sunday Tribune has learned.

The review team has spoken to dozens of people, including journalists who covered the killing and Bailey's subsequent arrest.

McAndrew's team, led by Chief Supt Willie Keane and Det Supt John McKeown, began interviewing people involved in the investigation in December 2005.

In an explosive new set of claims, the Sunday Tribune has learned that claims have been made to the McAndrew investigation team that gardai made direct threats against Ian Bailey's life.

In one incident, it is alleged that Bailey was told by a member of the gardai that he would be "shot dead". A member of the force allegedly threatened Bailey with a 'silver bullet' and told him that he would be got dead on a roadside.

In one of the most potentially damaging of the new allegations to come before the internal probe, the Sunday Tribune has discovered that McAndrew's team is investigating a claim that an unnamed third party was allegedly offered a quantity of cash and drugs in a bid to gain his assistance in obtaining information on Bailey.

One of the most infamous and perhaps crucial events in the saga, which occurred on 23 June 1997, has also come under McAndrew's spotlight, it is understood. Bailey entered Farrell's shop and he was "all wired up" . . . meaning he was carrying a tape recorder and wanted to record her saying that she was being pressurised into falsely fingering him.

Farrell claimed that Bailey initiated the meeting and the meeting formed part of a pattern in which Bailey was alleged to be hounding and intimidating Farrell.

But the Sunday Tribune has learned that gardai have documentary material . . . which predates the present McAndrew investigation . . . that was supplied by a third party, and which allegedly supports Ian Bailey's long-term claim that it was in fact Marie Farrell who had asked him to meet with her at that time to discuss her garda statements identifying him as the oddlooking man she saw across from her shop and also at Kealfadda bridge.

As recently revealed in this newspaper, Bailey is suing the state in relation to his alleged mistreatment during the garda murder probe. McAndrew expects to be able to present a final version of the report to garda commissioner Conroy possibly before Christmas or early in the new year.

Whether this report will be published remains to be seen, but in tandem with Bailey's legal action, or even separately, potentially shocking further developments are certain to follow.

TIMELINE OF THE DECADE 22/23 December 1996 Sophie Toscan Du Plantier is bludgeoned to death outside her tranquil retreat in Goleen, near Schull, Co Cork.

27 December 1996 Marie Farrell tells gardai she saw a suspicious person near her Schull shop on 21 December and had seen the same person early on the morning of 22 December.

10/11-17/18 January 1997 Farrell twice anonymously calls the garda con"dential line saying she saw a suspicious person near the murder scene at 3am on 23 December.

21 January 1998 Gardai call on Farrell and tell her they know she was the person who made the anonymous calls.

28 January 1997 In an interview with gardai, Farrell (RIGHT) claims Ian Bailey was the person she saw on 21 and 22 December and also at 3am on 23 December.

10 February 1997 Ian Bailey is arrested at his home. He is later released without charge.

18 April 2005 Farrell makes contact "out of the blue" with Bailey's solicitor Frank Buttimer acknowledging that she falsely identi"ed Bailey.

October 2005 Buttimer writes to Michael McDowell, copying his letter to the Garda Commissioner, informing him that Farrell had withdrawn her "identi"cation" of Ian Bailey. An investigation, headed by Asst Commisioner Ray McAndrew, is set up.