Up in the north, where once a year the land turns white with something called snow, a perp walk is a glorious affair where a suspect is paraded in front of cameras for all and sundry. But not in the land of mukimo.

Here, a perp walk means the less glamourous task of transferring suspects from the holding cells below the courtrooms to go face a judge in court.

How come I seem pleased at the idea of escorting people who haven’t been convicted yet? Well, it’s simple, really. The culmination of a cop’s work is arresting a suspect and presenting them in court. Basically, the conclusion of days, months, sometimes years of hard investigations. We do our best and what happens in court is out of our hands.

The reason I’m blabbing about all this is because to someone suspected of a crime, there is nothing scarier than the man on the bench. I’ve seen grown men cry like babies during a perp walk. No wonder judges wear black because theirs is a grim responsibility. Almost like the Grim Reaper himself. A judge stands between someone going back home to his loved ones or spending years behind bars among strangers who have lost all hope.

It is, therefore, with great horror that I witnessed the reverse of this phenomenon. For the first time in my life, I saw a judge looking more scared than all the suspects I’ve escorted to court. The man’s name is High Court judge Uhuru Kwisha. If you’ve been on this recent journey with me, you’ll remember him as the judge who signed papers to wrongfully condemn my partner Sgt Sophia to Shimo La Tewa prison for robbery with violence.

At first, I thought there was no way such a judge existed. How could a High Court judge make such a blatant mistake as signing a sentence decree when there had been no trial in the first place? So it is with a heavy heart that my boss Inspector Tembo and I walked into Judge Kwisha’s office and realised that the man does truly live and breathe.

“How could you do such a thing?” Tembo, who’s also Sophia’s father, asks once we’re past the tense pleasantries. “How can you condemn my daughter, a gallant police officer, to a life behind bars for nothing?”

The judge suddenly becomes like a cornered animal. “Sir,” he says, “I only did for my son what you’d do for your daughter.”

“The hell are you blathering about?” shouts Tembo.

“He’s 12 years old, my son. A month or so ago, he did not come home from school. We searched everywhere to no avail,” he says.

“That evening, I was at home with the cops when I received a text from an unknown source. Someone had my son. That he was safe but whoever had him wanted nothing ordinary. Not a ransom or for me to overturn a conviction. Only one task would set him free. I was to retrieve a sheaf of papers, sign them, stamp them officially, and leave them where I found them.”

“Did you tell this to the police in your house?”

“The text said if I involved anyone else, they would kill my son. I didn’t know what I signing. Honest to God. The papers were sealed tight and only the places to sign were exposed, but I had a hunch they were court orders,” Kwisha says.

“Inspector Tembo, I’m sure you’d do anything for your daughter. I will go to the ends of the earth for my son.”