Lockerbie, Scotland - The 10th anniversary is today. Prince Philip is coming to put down a wreath. The town will be locked tight with barricades and ropes. So Harvey Thomson kept his promises over the weekend, while he was still able to move around the town.

 Thomson is a retired constable, a cop. He is close with dozens of Pan Am Flight 103 families, including the kin of many students from Syracuse University and the State University College at Oswego. Some of them sent money in the mail this month. They asked Thomson, in their absence, to put down messages and flowers for the anniversary.

 Thomson did it. He placed flowers at public monuments or at the tiny shrines where students fell in Lockerbie. He expects to continue those small favors for the rest of his life.

 "I am starting to get children and grandchildren who come here and want to be shown around," Thomson said. He greets them. He shows them the gardens and fields he remembers all too well. Even now, those visitors sometimes burst into tears.

 And Thomson, as they weep, sees the whole thing once again.

 Ten years ago, Thomson was an off-duty dispatcher when Pan Am 103 exploded into Lockerbie. He hurried to meet his superintendent. They drove to the Tundergarth, where the nose of the plane had crashed to earth, where dozens of passengers lay quiet in the fields. Thomson was numb. "How in the hell," he asked softly, "are we ever going to sort any of this out?"

 "Let's go back," said his supervisor.

 That is the Scottish way. "Nothing for it," they say, "except for going on." Thomson did exactly that, although 10 years later you can sense the scars. Thomson, 60, sat with his wife, Margaret, as he spoke of the "air disaster," and sometimes he almost trembles as he speaks, and Margaret gives him gentle help during tales too hard to tell.

 His job was returning luggage to the families of 70 victims, including many students from Central New York. That stripped Thomson of a cop's great protection, the ability to keep a certain distance from the lost. You cannot match a wedding ring or blue jeans to a person you don't know. Thomson and his crew began creating profiles, learning the routines and journeys of each victim. For the police, every passenger needed to live again.

 Thomson developed all the film that he could find. He spent hours studying the way people dressed in every photo. His duties included returning baby bottles. Often, looking at a bottle with dried juice or formula, Thomson knew a child was holding it as the bomb went off.

 He also coped with unopened Christmas presents. Two grandparents, for instance, had sent neatly wrapped gifts to their grandchildren. The children's parents decided to bring the gifts onto Pan Am 103. Thomson returned the gifts, still wrapped and waiting, to the stunned grandparents.

 Thomson gets emotional when speaking of everyday people who helped out. He collected piles of clothes drenched in jet fuel, clothes he described quietly as carrying "the smell of death." The women of Lockerbie, he said, volunteered to wash and rewash all those clothes.

 Getting to know the victims, young and old, was almost unbearable. Margaret Thomson said Lockerbie earned a bittersweet gift from tragedy, an ability to appreciate a solitary life. Now, when a news report speaks of how a bombing raid killed 25 in Iraq, the people of Lockerbie count to 25 by ones.

 "There was a lot of potential among those Syracuse students, a lot of young people who would have really done something with their lives," Thomson said. Doctors. Singers. Writers. To do his job, Thomson sorted through their dreams.

 For months, he greeted weary relatives on their first trips into town. Thomson would always tell them to get some sleep. In the morning, he would drive them to a warehouse where the luggage had been stored. Marion Alderman Jablonski of Rome, N.Y., can remember the enormity of all those racks of goods, the way Thomson handed her a blue dress worn by her daughter, Paula.

 "He told me, 'I knew she'd wear a dress like this,' " Marion recalls. The dress was torn and ripped, "like a rag," Marion said. She recognized it because she had stitched it herself.

 Thomson could not avoid taking the job home. "It took a long time for Harvey to move past it," Margaret said. "He puts his heart into whatever he does. In some ways, it did isolate him." The Thomsons were awaiting the birth of their first grandchild, and a close friend was dying of cancer, and the shadow of the plane fell over Harvey's family.

 On the day their granddaughter Anna was born, Margaret put a photo of the baby into a gold frame, and she gave it to Harvey to put on his desk. "I wanted him to have a reminder of what to live for," Margaret said.

 It helped. Thomson became close with many American families. Every year, at Christmas, he gets a stack of cards. He and Margaret have been to Syracuse to see the campus monument for Flight 103. The parents of one SU student, whose daughter had a superb singing voice, gave him a cassette tape of their child singing many Broadway classics.

 Harvey loves the tape. He often plays it in his car. He never met her, but he knows her. She sings on in Lockerbie.

Sean Kirst's column appears in The Post-Standard and Herald-Journal on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him by calling 470-6015 or by e-mail at citydesk@syracuse.com.