Fuengirola is sunny in late autumn, and PJ Howard's apartment is at the top of one of three towers near the centre of the Spanish seaside town. It overlooks a marina packed with pleasure boats.

It was here that the millionaire businessman and his girlfriend Sharon Collins spent much of their time together since they met in 1998. Now she's locked up in Mountjoy prison, Dublin, starting a six-year sentence for conspiring to murder him.

Despite all the evidence that Collins betrayed him, Howard has an unshakeable belief that his partner did not conspire to have him and his two sons killed. Despite dozens of e-mails retrieved by gardai, which convinced a jury to convict Collins on three counts of soliciting and conspiring to murder, the retired Clare businessmen is risking the ridicule of the world by standing firmly behind her.

Last week, he agreed to be interviewed for the first time to explain why he has damaged his reputation and his relationship with his two sons by supporting Collins - and even actively trying to find evidence to clear her name.

The first sign of his do-anything-for-you generosity - from which Collins continues to benefit - is his insistence on picking up this reporter from Malaga airport in his modest rental car. The wary Howard is paranoid about bumping into tabloid newspaper reporters who descended on Spain last week.

Sitting in a restaurant, the 59-year-old satisfies himself no one is watching and then pulls out a file he has assembled “at some cost” on the Collins case. He is aware that he has been portrayed as a “fool” - a man infatuated with a femme fatale now known as Lying Eyes, or “the devil in the red dress”. “If I believed for one minute that Sharon did what the gardai say she did, I would run a mile from her,” said Howard.

“But from the moment our offices were broken in to, and we heard of the American connection, Sharon told me it might be connected to Maria Marconi. Her story hasn't changed one iota since.”

Marconi, described by the prosecution at Collins's trial as a “fictitious character”, is supposedly a creative-writing tutor whom she met on the internet and to whom Collins confided intimate personal details.

When Essam Eid, an Egyptian poker dealer, was arrested in 2006 for trying to extort ¤100,000 from Howard's son Robert, Collins told her partner this might have something to do with the mysterious Marconi. Howard said that after the gardai accused Collins of soliciting Eid for murder, he “pushed her hard as to the truth” of the Marconi theory.

“I have spoken to her strongly about this story at various times, and we have had serious words about it, but at no stage has she ever changed her story,” said Howard. So he believes her. Not just that, he has spent a fortune trying to get Collins off the hook, including paying for a sketch artist to draw Marconi, and for private investigators in Ireland and America. He believes Collins with all his heart and is unhappy with the way gardai investigated the Marconi lead.

LAST Monday, much to the consternation of prosecution lawyers, Howard made a victim impact statement at Collins's sentencing hearing, begging the judge not to jail her. His statement revealed the animosity he feels towards the gardai who investigated the case.

“I was forced to hire a barrister to fight my corner so I could make that statement. That should have been my right,” he said. “At no time did gardai say I could make a statement, because they knew I would be supporting Sharon.”

For Howard, it wasn't the first time gardai under the direction of Superintendent John Scanlon had tried to discourage him from supporting Collins. After she was charged last year, she was brought before the High Court for a bail hearing at which Howard believes gardai told the judge he “feared for his life”. Gardai deny saying this.

Howard claims he was advised by detectives not to attend the hearing “because it wouldn't look good”, so instead he waited outside the court in Cloverhill with extra money in case the bail was set higher than €70,000. “When I heard they'd said I was afraid, I was furious,” he said. “It wasn't true, because I had contributed €14,000 towards the bail.”

As far as Howard is concerned, the garda's attitude was wrong from the beginning, and he believes Collins is the victim of a complex scam. The Lying Eyes e-mails, which appear to be incontrovertible evidence that Collins conspired to have him killed, are “too perfect”, he maintains.

“I have been in business buying property a long time, and I have never seen a deal run through 100% without any problems,” he said. “These fellas had a run like Jesus. They said to me they had never seen so much evidence against a person in their lives, yet they didn't find that unusual?”

For Howard, the Marconi theory makes sense. “Sharon was on to me she wanted to do something besides hanging around all the time, and I had suggested writing on numerous occasions,” he said. “I told her she would be excellent at it.”

Howard believes Collins met Marconi online, and agreed to send the tutor pieces of writing about people she knew and places she went. All this personal detail, Howard believes, became ammunition for online fraudsters who then targeted his family and created the infamous Lying Eyes e-mails.

“I think Sharon made a serious mistake. She left herself wide open and I spoke to her about this,” he said “It was a serious mistake of judgment for Sharon to give private information to somebody in America.

“America is rife with extortionists. Extortion rackets originate there. They can dream them up quicker than they can whack them out here.” He adds, laughing, “If I thought she was giving out private information about us, I would have murdered her myself.”

Collins supposedly told Marconi “about all the houses and cars we owned, so these people [realised] there is bound to be a bit of money there”. No amount of evidence presented by gardai could convince Howard that Collins was the author of the Lying Eyes e-mails that requested his and his sons' murders.

“Can you see anyone sending off an e-mail to Tony Luciano [Eid's pseudonym], saying, ‘I want two marks killed'?” Howard demands. “One in Ennis and another in Fuengirola, to look like suicide? And signing it Sharon Collins? You'd want to be mentally retarded to do something like that. I can assure you Sharon is not. She has a high IQ and could have been in Mensa. I don't believe she sent those e-mails.”

The discrepancy that most agitates Howard is the ricin found in a contact-lens case in Eid's cell in Limerick prison. This deadly poison went unnoticed for seven months while Eid was in custody.

“Surely somebody would have noticed this contact-lens case before that,” Howard said. “If you take the ricin out of this, there is a serious doubt about the whole case. Why do all this investigation over a couple of e-mails? You put this deadly poison into it then it changes the whole view of the case.”

HOWARD firmly believes that neither he nor Robert and [Niall, his two sons, were ever in danger. “I was never in fear of my life, and I seriously believe Robert feels the same,” he said.

But in their victim impact statement, Howard's sons said the case had affected them socially and emotionally. They said their relationship with their father was “weakened”. Howard is not happy with the statement, but insists they can put their differences over Collins to one side.

“They asked the barrister to put in the minimum,” he said. “They didn't feel they said too much, but they said enough. When we bring up the case, I give my side to it and they give theirs. Then we finish with that subject, pack it aside and do our business. I talk to Robert every single morning and we discuss business and I give him my advice.”

While there is regular contact between Howard and his sons, they do not share what they are doing in terms of Collins or the case. When Howard visited his girlfriend in jail for the first time, his sons only learnt about it in the newspapers. Equally, he was unaware of the content of his sons' victim impact statement.

During the memorable criminal trial Howard was at the centre of its two most jaw-dropping moments. The first, a kiss for Collins in the dock, was, he believes, linked to the second, an e-mail from Collins entered into evidence in which she described her life with her partner as “unbearable” because he was into “strange sex”.

“First, I did not kiss Sharon on the lips,” said Howard. “I kissed her on the cheek, and it is common practice around the world to kiss someone on the cheek when you are saying goodbye. I was showing her my support. I wanted to make that obvious to the gardai because I felt they had done enough damage at that stage.”

Collins's e-mail, which was sent to the Gerry Ryan radio show, seemed to present further motive for Lying Eyes to kill Howard. “The first I heard of it was when I read it in the Irish paper here in Fuengirola,” he said. “I felt pulverised. I believe it was used because I wouldn't toe the line. They expected me to move to Australia after it and stop annoying them.”

Howard admits there was a bitterness between himself and Collins over this humiliating e-mail. “I've had very few opportunities to repudiate those allegations, but they aren't true. She told me the e-mail was her writing - being creative.”

The truth about their private life, he says, is that they lived quietly. “We would go out maybe one or two nights a week. Go boating during the day and have a barbecue.”

Now, he hopes his private investigators will unearth new evidence to help Collins's appeal, due next year. Unless the appeal is successful, he does not expect to live to see Collins finish her six-year sentence. Howard suffered a major heart problem in 2000 and says he is on borrowed time.

“It's a waste of a good human being to put the likes of Sharon in to jail,” he said. “I don't think I'll be alive by the time Sharon serves her full sentence. I'm past my sell-by-date already. I want to set things right before I go.

“I'd like to see the appeal working. I wouldn't live in Ireland with Sharon but, if she'd have me, we would live somewhere away from everybody.” Collins can expect to be freed no earlier than November 2012. Whenever it is, and if time allows, Howard will be waiting.