THE police thought Martin Toner had fled justice.

His family feared he was dead: they were right.

The 34-year-old businessman was reported missing on June 29, 2004, just weeks before he was due to appear on cocaine smuggling charges.

His older brother, James, won't forget the date: it is tattooed on to the inside of his wrist. "Martin went missing on June 29 and he died on June 29.

"Initially it was a missing person inquiry.

"The police were looking in cupboards and under beds and in car boots. "And we were telling them: 'This is serious, Martin would not do this.' "They were not taking it seriously at all.

"It was voiced to us that one of the lines they had to look at was that Martin had run away because of his drug trial that was coming up."

Two weeks later, at one in the morning of July 13, a farmer called John Baxter was working in a field near Langbank in Renfrewshire when the headlights of his tractor lit up something under a hedge.

It was Martin Toner. The father-of-two had been stabbed in the head, neck and body and his throat had been slit.

Even before the body was identified, James Toner knew it was his brother. He said: "When he went missing, my initial instinct was that something was wrong.

"As time went on I know that we probably would not be getting Martin back alive. Part of me was hoping he had run away but realistically I was expecting the worst."

James didn't just know his brother was dead. He also thought the Crown had prosecuted the right man: a former policeman called Doug Fleming and one of Martin Toner's co-accused at the coming drugs trial.

On Tuesday, a jury was not so sure. Eleven years after the killing, 15 men and women found a murder charge against Mr Fleming, 50, not proven. The case against another man, John McDonald, 57, was deserted earlier in the trial.

The jury did not know that Mr Fleming had had previous run-ins with the law. Charges he had conspired, with Martin Toner, to import drugs direct from Columbia had also been found not proven in 2008.

But Fleming left Central Scotland Police in 1988. After then he found himself arrested in Spain on drugs charges.

By the time of the killing, he was, formally, a property developer with common business interests with Martin Toner.

James Toner, who was a social worker in 2004, knew this.

In testimony at the High Court in Glasgow, James said that Mr Fleming had claimed he had taken Martin to Langbank - where Mr Fleming lived - to split up £100,000 he had hidden in a field there.

Mr Fleming, according to James Toner, had one £10,000 bundle and given Martin another nine. Mr Fleming, however, denied this conversation ever took place.

James, now 50, he says those days in 2004 were completely unreal.

Speaking to the Evening Times, he said: "I have spoken to other people who have experienced something similar and they all say the same thing. Even when you say the words 'My brother has been murdered', it doesn't sound right It was like a cartoon. "None of it felt real."

He knows Martin broke the law. James said: "Martin was up to all sorts.

"He was not a bad guy. His past was flowery.

"He had been in prison but he was not a bad person. He would not have done that to anybody and left them in a field like that.

"He was fit and he could look after himself. His temper was shorter than mine. But he was not a stereotypical drug dealer who used violence as part of his work.

"Gangster is a word that gets used. When I think 'gangster' I think Al Capone. Martin was not Al Capone."

The two boys were close. Too close sometimes. The five year difference had not stopped a rivalry. "Sometimes our house was like a western. There were two guys like John Wayne and Victor Victor McLaglen.

"My mammy brought the two of us up when my father died when I was just 10. That was in South Africa. He took her there in '72 and we came back around '75. My mum tells me were back within two weeks."

Agnes Toner, mother to James and Martin, lost her husband when he was 33 and her second son when he was 34.

James too brought her worries. After Martin died, James, he admits, suffered a crisis. He "ran away" - his words - to India where was he first jailed and then held on legal limbo for four years on trumped-up drugs charges.

His case became international news after Prime Minister David Cameron intervened.

Back in Scotland for two years, James has put that behind him. He has, he says, learned to forgive himself and stop think of himself as a victim. The victim: Martin, his widow an their two children.

He said: "Nobody deserves to die that way and nobody deserves to be found by a farmer in a field two weeks after they've died."

As soon as Martin's was found, the police took the case very seriously. "I think, for them, a murder is a murder, no buts," James said.

So much has happened in the decade since the killing. Martin's eldest has grown up. His then baby is now at secondary school.

James tries to remember his brother as he was. Spared the sight of Martin's remains, he always worried about Mr Baxter, the farmer, who found them. "If the police did not want us to see Martin, what did that poor man see?" he said.

He added: "I used to go sit where Martin was found. There is a cracking view. It a lovely spot. Once I met the farmer. He said he had been thinking about me since the day he saw me on TV ten years ago.

"He could tell me not to worry; he had not seen anything. All he saw was Martin's back in the hedge.

"Now I find that spot more comforting than Martin's grave in Linn Park.

"After my years in India, there is a bit of the Buddhist in me know so I am not big on the grave thing, I believe his energy is out there and with me all the time.

"It was Martin's birthday on the last Friday of the trial and he would have been 45.

"He was a family man, who was dedicated to his wife and his two kids. Everything he did, he did to provide for them. He had been with his wife since he was 15. He was a loyal, loyal person.

"I have let all my anger go. But a human being had his life taken away from him an in unnatural way."