'The children are adapting well to the post-cat era. Maybe I should move on, too'

'That is a genuine sighting," my wife says confidently upon returning home from a weekend away. She has just played back the message on our answering machine in which an unidentified woman claims that she has just seen our missing cat, James, in the garden of a specific address.

I am less certain, for two reasons. The first is that the address the woman has given does not exist. The second is that I have discovered that when you put up posters announcing that your small, grey cat is missing, with the word "Reward" picked out in rainbow capitals, people come up to you while you're busy affixing it to something, to tell you they saw your cat just the other day, at a rate of approximately one bogus claim per poster.

"Yeah, I seen him up by the flats last night," says a large man, who approaches me on a neighbouring road. "How much is the reward?"

He hasn't even read the description, but I'm slightly relieved that he hasn't come over to give me a hard time about sticking a drawing pin in a tree, which is also something that happens when you put up missing cat posters. To any readers who may have similar concerns, let me just say that the pin was there already, and I don't care.

"Really?" I say, without looking up from my work. "Whereabouts exactly?"

"You know, wotsit. Just up the back there." He is pointing around an imaginary corner.

"I'll be sure to look there, thanks." I decide that this will be my last poster. If I'd known I was going to have to interact with people, I would have sent one of the children.

My wife's confidence, however, renews my fading hopes. For several days I have been riding my bicycle around the area, trying to locate the elusive St Mark's Court and calling "James" in a voice not quite loud enough to attract anything but suspicion. When I should be working, I find myself wondering whether the cat is dead or lost or suffering from memory loss. I consider the possibility that he may have simply buggered off to live with someone who is either more attentive or a bit freer with the cat food. I always imagined that my studied indifference to the cat was precisely what he wanted from me.

I behaved the same way when Lupin (two cats back) went missing, mooning around peering into windows until Lupin turned up dead in next door's garden, flat on the underside and stiff as a salt cod, clearly showing signs of having been hit by a car. I didn't do it when Kipper went missing, because, to be honest, Kipper was a bit of a jerk, but he turned up alive three days later, clearly showing signs of having been hit by a car. These, I think, are the possible outcomes.

After some further investigation, I ring my wife.

"There's a St Mark's Close," I say, "off St Mark's Road, but it's a fair way up. Maybe she meant that."

"He couldn't be that stupid, could he?" We both pause to reassess the cat's stupidity in the light of this new information.

"Well, he never struck me as having that sort of initiative," I say. "Do you think he's started a new life?"

"Don't know," she says. "Are you planning on going up there?"

"I've been. Twice."

Meanwhile, the children seem to be adapting well to the post-James era. They do not appear to require the sort of closure that a flattened corpse might bring. I begin to think that maybe I should move on, too.

Then, 12 days after he disappeared, the phone rings. "We have James," says the voice at the other end. It sounds like the beginning of a ransom demand, but it turns out that James has been trapped in a half-built basement flat two doors down the whole time. Stupid cat.