MICK North sits down in a chair in the middle of a large, cosy room in a town house in the leafy west end of Glasgow. The house belongs to his partner. "She's a private person, " he says, quietly, "and I'd prefer to keep it that way."A black-and-white photograph of North with his daughter, Sophie, sits behind him on a wall. Another on the fireplace surround. Poignant reminders of his abject loss. Soberly tailored in a casual shirt and beige trousers, North is an imposing, articulate man with puffy eyes and hair that f lops in different directions. He has a pleasant, nervous smile that seems tired and wary. Despite becoming such a public figure since Sophie was murdered in Dunblane Primary School, in Perthshire, on March 13, 1996, North is, as I suspect he always has been, somewhat shy. A reserved individual thrust into the spotlight by circumstances rather than by design.

But when he talks of Sophie he releases a smile like a birthday balloon. "It's both been a long and short decade, " he says, averting his gaze. "It certainly seems like yesterday in terms of the intensity of some of the recollections and memories. And, of course, going back to times when Sophie was alive, certainly some of those memories are very intense. When they do happen they are happy memories. But they are always tinged with sadness."

Shortly after dropping Sophie off at school, North drove to work at Stirling University, where he taught biochemistry. He didn't kiss his daughter that morning and can't recall if that was unusual. "She might not have kissed me the day before either. But I'm left with the image of her standing quietly on the other side of the room."

He closes his eyes, to picture her. He remembers Sophie asking for a plaster to cover a scratch on her arm made by their cat. He remembers her eating Coco Pops. He remembers the fresh snow on the ground outside as she walked in her blue shirt, grey pinafore and red Dunblane primary sweatshirt. He remembers that it was after 11 when a colleague knocked on his door at work telling him there had been a shooting incident at the school.

Thomas Hamilton, a social misfit who ran clubs for boys and had attracted the attention of the police, had got into the school and started shooting in the gym. Minutes later, one teacher, Gwen Mayor, and 16 children were dead. Having being given an extraordinarily free hand to kill, the gunman turned his weapon on himself.

North remembers it took more than five hours before he was told Sophie was dead. The facts hit him like a thousand angry fists. Weeks later he learned that Sophie had been shot five times - in the head and chest, in the hand, buttock and leg. One bullet for each year of her life. Hamilton had two 9mm Browning HP pistols, two Smith and Wesson .357 revolvers and 743 cartridges. He used just one gun that he kept reloading. 105 shots in something like three minutes. He used a second gun to kill himself. Some killings are emblematic. Dunblane tipped the scale.

Mick North grew up in London and attended Oxford. After graduating, he found a post at Stirling where he met Barbara, a researcher; she became pregnant around a year after they met. He was nervous about becoming a father in his forties but, despite this, they moved to Dunblane in 1990 to get a house large enough to raise their child. Nine months after Sophie was born, Barbara was diagnosed with breast cancer. Sophie turned three when her mother died, aged just 31. North promised his dying wife he would look after his daughter. Then Hamilton killed her. And North's world imploded. From that moment on he has suffered terrible, irrational guilt. "I couldn't keep my promise, " he says, his mouth turned downward in grimace. "I know it wasn't my fault but . . ."

What happened in that small Perthshire town defied, and still does, any kind of rational explanation. But North doesn't feel it possible to rationalise the behaviour of someone, particularly when they are dead and cannot answer questions. "He is the only one who can ever answer. Who knows whether he knew why he did it? I think it's made things far easier for me for him not to be here." Not because Hamilton's death satisfied a desire for revenge, but because it stopped North from confronting the issue of capital punishment.

"For as long as I can remember I've been against it. It would have posed a question of me had he survived. I didn't ask around, but I have the feeling I would have been in the minority had Hamilton lived. I think the murder of 16 children and their teacher would inevitably have raised the question. For me, you don't use punishment for revenge."

The notion of revenge is not something that was ever high on his list. "It was always kept in check. It is so hard to know how I really feel when the perpetrator is dead. When the police officer told me the gunman had died, he said it in a way that I knew he killed himself. That was it as far as seeking revenge. I don't think I brooded on him. I brooded terribly on the loss of Sophie. It dominated everything." It still does. And the problem of allocating blame.

"At the first meeting [of bereaved parents] somebody asked: 'Does anyone feel angry?' All of us said 'no'. Anger was not the dominating thing and when there was some anger it was towards the police for their attitude towards us on the day." Initially the police refused to confirm any fatalities to the families, while making announcements to the media. "Maybe if some of us had met Hamilton and had direct interaction there may have been anger. It's something I will never know."

BRIEFLY, we touch on the subject of forgiveness. But 10 years on he hasn't suddenly awoken one day and found himself forgiving. "I didn't, no. I don't really know. Who am I going to forgive? The memory of a man who isn't here any more. It's too . . . intangible." North took a year off work and, in the end, on advice from his GP, took early retirement in 1997. Six months after the murders he wrote about the things happening around him, culminating in the publication of his book, Dunblane: Never Forget, in 2000. He has lived on his work pension, topped up with money from the Dunblane fund since then. He accepts that people can move on, accepts also that people may be indifferent to what happened, but he cannot accept people forgetting.

While the other parents had each other or other children, he only had Sophie. So they became very close. They wore each other like a pair of gloves. They became travelling companions. When North attended conferences Sophie went too. As they toured north America they would play music and chat, side by side. Father and daughter.

"She was a great girl, " says North, softly. His grief is still raw, never far from the surface. There was, and probably still is, the perception that he suffered the greatest burden because his wife had died two years previously. "I think that's what people said. I always thought that all of us had lost a child at that particular time and I don't think there should have been a hierarchy of bereavement." After the death of Barbara he had to fend emotionally for himself and his daughter. But not even Barbara's death could prepare him for Sophie's.

"It was totally irrational feeling guilty. But it still came to haunt me. It was an icy day. Had she tripped on ice and twisted her ankle and had a day off school she would have survived." At the same time, he adds: "I don't want to speak for anybody else but I know that some parents of those children who were off that day have had quite a lot of problems with feeling guilt. Nobody comes out of this without feeling some guilt. Time is not a healer. It might give distance and perspective but it does not heal."

He moved to Loch Tay six months after the shootings. It's a remote location, but one that suited the sense of isolation he felt since the murders. "There is an emptiness. Not a loneliness. Loneliness is not the same. I've always said that although there have been periods when I have been on my own and I have been alone, they are not necessarily lonely."

He still keeps a lot of Sophie's stuff there. "My house has a lot of cupboards. I don't have to sort them out or throw them away. I've not felt the need."

Despite the passage of time, North doesn't believe he will ever be satisfied in terms of seeking an overall truth as to how this terrible breach of nature was allowed to take place. "I think the truth has got muddied recently, " he says. "It's hard to use the expression 'seeking the truth' as if there is some kind of perfect truth that will solve everything to everyone's satisfaction. There are still a lot of loose ends. Some people think those lead to a cover-up. I have decided on the basis of what I've been able to see that things that went wrong and things that should have been done, things that were done and shouldn't have been done, happened as a result of incompetence, shortsightedness, human faults in faulty systems and bad law. But I can't see any hard evidence for some kind of conspiracy."

More than 100 files relating to Hamilton and his shooting spree were opened to the public in October last year. The material was instructed to be "closed" for 100 years, but just more than two years ago Scottish ministers ordered them unsealed.

At the time, North said publicly there were no hidden secrets. He had, after all, followed the case like a sleuth. His litany of all the things that were overlooked, however, paints a far more grey picture than black-and-white. "You could go on searching forever and find little bits. But I don't know if it's going to say any more.

"It's not going to provide the kind of explanations that we as a society really need. And that is: 'how do you deal with someone like Thomas Hamilton before he goes over the edge?' He was a strange, unusual person, but part of the community. He went shooting, he was accepted."

Hamilton's interest in boys was believed to be less than healthy for most of his adult life. In months before the shootings, Hamilton complained his attempts to set up a boys' club were subject to police persecution. Despite growing unease among parents, police and local authorities, he was never prosecuted or denied a firearms certificate. Hamilton was smart in many areas. Except life.

"There has been a lot of revision of people's relationships with him. But some people have stood up and said I didn't find him too bad a chap. Now that is not someone who is evil. But year after year he was getting more and more upset about the society he lived in. At what point can this be spotted? And at what point can anyone intervene? We still don't know."

While evil beginnings are usually banal - low status, humiliation, job loss - North rejects the notion that Hamilton was intrinsically evil. "I can't think of him in terms of evil. The act he committed was evil. I think it's too convenient to label someone as evil because then you can easily say, 'he was nothing to do with us'. It serves the gun lobby. He was a pain, he wrote letters to people, he annoyed people. But he was still part of a relatively normal society. I don't think I've misread things. I can't rule out there being a stack of things elsewhere. But the documents that were released contained nothing substantial."

HE'S been a member of the Gun Control Network since 1996 and the group continues to meet regularly. Their main issues over the past few years have been imitation guns and air weapons. More recently, following a trip to Uganda to see child soldiers, he went to Istanbul to help the Grimasons, from East Kilbride, whose son, Alistair, was shot dead there. "It's important we keep putting forward the arguments for tight control."

His quest for truth is not about trying to blame or seek scapegoats, but about trying to prevent more tragedies. "I will take time off, " he says, sighing deeply. "I will review the situation after the tenth anniversary. Although I've handled it in a surprisingly detached way at times, there is obviously an emotional side to it because it's about guns. But I feel some kind of obligation to remain involved. I'm doing this because I have seen how quickly lives can be taken away by one person using one gun. It [the anniversary] won't be a day about moving on any more than any other day is about that."

While any notion of "recovery" as a concept remains as slippery as an icy street, his grief is something he is now more comfortable with. "It comes in waves, " he says. "Unexpectedly at times. It sort of catches you out. It can be a sound, a sight or smell. But it's getting easier. People say 'let her go'. A woman wrote to me two months after the shootings and told me that. It's impossible.

"I don't think anything prepares you for your child's death. No-one knows what it feels like unless it happens to them. She used to talk about being an air-stewardess and, as she described it, an office-madam." He wonders what she would be like now. "What it would be like for her arguing with her dad, arguing over boyfriends and things? I think about her being the BBC Young Musician of the Year."

RECENTLY he set up the Sophie North Charitable Trust. Its aim is to make donations to causes related to breast cancer and children's diseases, among other things. The bulk of his estate will go there. "We wrote the first cheque last week. That will keep her memory alive. I feel proud of that."

Ten years on and deep depressions and nightmares have passed through the years like a chronic illness. He remains on anti-depressants. "My general level of health is not as good as I'm getting older. I can't deal with things as I perhaps used to be able to. I've had one or two problems in the past year that have been particularly difficult to deal with." But he won't elaborate.

Following Sophie's death, he became more spiritual, "but it's something that's difficult to articulate". North, who was raised a Methodist but turned his back on religion as a teenager, was assured by friends he would see her again in heaven.

Does he believe in heaven now? "Not in any kind of after-life way. But as long as the memory is there, there is some part of Sophie that remains part of me. If that can be explained in some kind of spiritual terms then that's fine." He still communicates with his daughter - "I don't say the words out loud or mouth them" - and wonders what she would think of things, and the decisions he makes. "There is a sense of some kind of answer coming back."

Does he still seek her approval as a father? "Oh, yes, I think so." He closes his eyes.

He has kept some nursery videos of Sophie, watching them occasionally over the years. He also has an audio tape of her voice that, curiously, he has never listened to. And suspects he never will. "It was in a karaoke machine. She must have switched it on by herself. I never have listened to it. I think it will be hard to. I don't need to yet."Will there be a time when he does? He pauses. There is no more intimate insight into North's inner feelings and state of mind. "That's really hard to know."

Adecade has passed and this father of a beautiful five-year-old who was shot to death in Dunblane is still searching for answers. But his journey has not been driven by anger. It's been driven by love. "We did manage to pack in a lot and that's no compensation for not being able to do more afterwards. But being able to remember them . . . it's important."

He smiles. "We drove hundreds of miles round north America, " he tells me again. "She was a great companion. There were one or two moments of her being a little grumpy . . ." He laughs. The shift in tone reflects his utter devotion to Sophie. Even when he is surrounded by the absurdity and waste of what happened, North is a man keenly alive to his daughter's memory. Both fond and terrible.

For 10 years he has been searching for his daughter. The world has moved on, but North hasn't necessarily moved with it. What he has tried to do is even the violence visited upon Dunblane by accepting it happened. But never, ever forgetting. Only he can decide when his journey ends.