"Then I went across the street to the supermarket and I observed that I was still being observed by them. I found myself watching the detectives watching me." Hindsight would eventually suggest to Bailey that the cops had him fingered even then for a killing he insists he had nothing to do with.

The following day, the two gardaA- showed up at Prarie Cottage, the home Bailey shared with his partner Jules Thomas, outside the west Cork town. "They spoke to me in the yard. I had my sleeves rolled up. I wasn't trying to hide the welts, " he said. The welts Bailey was referring to were, he says, inflicted when he was cutting down a Christmas tree on 22 December, 1996. That night, somebody bashed in du Plantier's skull, following what appears to have been a struggle.

Then the cops turned up the heat. On new year's eve, Bailey came home and more of them were at the cottage, one in particular interfering with Thomas. "He was yanking the hair out of Jules's head on the basis that he required hair samples, " Bailey told the court.

They wanted to know everything about him, where he came from, his previous relationships, where he had been on the days leading up to the killing.

A month later, Detective Superintendent Dermot O'Dwyer showed up at the cottage.

In Bailey's account, the senior cop spoke to the murder suspect with some awe, telling Bailey he should have been a cop. Then, "he [O'Dwyer] said: 'I'm going to put you at Kilfeada bridge on the early hours of the morning'. I said that was absolute nonsense. He said 'we'll see'." The implication was that the gardaA- would provide evidence that Bailey was near the murder scene, around the time the woman was killed.

Two weeks later, he was arrested. On the way to being questioned, the officers in the car were extremely aggressive and hostile. The driver told him that, irrespective of whether they could pin the murder on him, he would be found one day with a bullet in the back of his head.

Bailey's counsel also referred to an agent provocateur, a man being paid in money and drugs by the gardaA- to stitch Bailey up. No evidence to that effect was heard before the trial was abandoned on Friday.

If the first libel trial appeared like a backdoor murder trial, then much of the appeal had the character of a tribunal into alleged garda misbehaviour. That would in all likelihood have changed as the trial progressed, had it not been abandoned.

Others were in Bailey's firing line. A 14-yearold boy was put under duress to say that Bailey told him he had killed the Frenchwoman. A senior journalist either erred or lied in telling the cops that Bailey had told her he knew du Plantier before the killing. Solicitors working for newspapers engaged in effective criminal malpractice by allowing into evidence a statement they knew to be false.

A neighbour and friend of his partner supplied numerous accounts of conversations that simply weren't true.

That's all part of Bailey's vista. His own position in this vista is curious. In the months following the killing, Bailey, a journalist, had a number of stories about the killing published under his byline in this newspaper and The Star. When asked in court about details in the stories, he invariably said they were provided by other reporters. Somehow, as a freelance journalist, he managed to get stories published without contributing much of significance to them.

He also went about his work without the cooperation of the gardaA-, quite a feat in Irish crime reporting. Many of the facts attributed to him in stories, he told the court, originated with other journalists.

His interpretation of violence towards Thomas was also curious. An assault on the woman in 1993 that required hospital treatment was really down to him pushing her out of bed. "It was more shock than injury, " he told the court. In 1996, he assaulted her in a car after a misunderstanding. And in 2001, he battered her with a crutch after she had grabbed it. His account of these events make them sound like minor disagreements that got slightly out of hand. That is at odds with versions given by witnesses at the circuit court.

As for the vista he painted of how his life fell apart after the killing, the opportunity to test it was lost on Friday when the case was settled. Counsel for the papers, Paul Gallagher, began his cross-examination on Thursday and was just getting into his stride when the court adjourned for the day. Now the forensic testing of Bailey's vista in the witness box will not go ahead.

Three years ago at the circuit court hearing, Gallagher's filleting of Bailey was one of the main planks of the newspapers' defence of libel. The court found that articles by six of the eight papers didn't libel Bailey by reporting on the suspicion that he had committed the murder.

"One can only presume Mr Bailey likes a certain amount of notoriety and limelight and a certain amount of publicity, " judge Patrick Moran ruled on that occasion. Two papers were found to have libelled him by saying he was violent towards his ex-wife, notwithstanding the evidence of his violence against Thomas.

Things have moved on since then. A key witness at the circuit court hearing, Marie Farrell, has withdrawn a statement saying she saw Bailey at Kilfeada bridge on the night of the killing. She now claims she was put under duress by the gardaA- to give the statement. She supplied that statement in 1997 and gave her evidence to the circuit court hearing in 2003.

As a result of Farrell's allegations, assistant commissioner Ray McAndrew has spent a year investigating the garda operation surrounding Ms du Plantier's murder. His report is due to be completed next month. Bailey is taking a civil action against the state for unlawful arrest.

The DPP has publicly acknowledged that he is no longer interested in Bailey as far as the murder is concerned. A civil action by the du Plantier family has been dropped.

The result of Friday's turn of events is that Bailey's slate is wiped clean. If he had lost, he would be in hock to Euro1m in circuit court costs and at least the same again for this High Court hearing. A life of penury would have beckoned.

Now he faces into his action against the state in the black. Last week, the outline of his case against the gardaA- was aired. It may have provided food for thought for the force.

Whatever the merits of a defence, a washing of dirty linen in public, post-Donegal, is hardly an attractive prospect. Don't bet against a settlement. Whether justice would be served by such a course is another matter.

On Thursday, Bailey told the court his life had been hell since his first arrest in February 1997.

By Friday, the cards of fate were beginning to fall his way.