No one has ever been prosecuted.This week, finally, the worm turned This week, at last, I caught a thief. Not to put too fine a point on it, I have become a have-a-go-hero The feeling is strange, but good-strange. I think.It was Monday, early evening, and darkness was falling. My four-year-old was playing at my feet while I nursed my four-month-old baby in the living room.

My husband was at the top of the house, finishing his day's work in his office It wasn't quite an idyll though. There was a Bob the Builder video on.We heard a knock on the door (the hall is next to the living room), and I assumed it was my brother. The baby was breast-feeding, so I asked my son to answer the door. I heard him open it and tell someone that mum was watching Bob the Builder and dad was working.The baby was still feeding.

I didn't want to disturb him, but I wanted to know what was happening I called out, but no-one answered. Then the front door slammed and my son trotted back into the living room. He didn't know the person who had been at the door and they'd gone now anyway, he said.Still, it was unsettling. A little time passed, my son wandered off to play in the hall, and everything returned to normal. The baby was finally fast asleep.Suddenly I felt a cold draught and realised the front door was open again I laid the baby on the sofa, and stepped into the hall. My son was sitting outside on the front steps, something he knows is forbidden, and never does. But when I scolded him for opening the door, he said that the lady had opened it."What lady?''"The lady in the red coat.

She went upstairs to see daddy."So someone had been, or was still, upstairs in the house. I went into my office, on the ground floor at the back of the hall, and telephoned up to my husband But his phone was engaged There was nothing to do but go to investigate myself. Then, as I stepped into the hall, parallel with the staircase, the back of a silent, hooded figure appeared above and in front of me on the stairs.I yelled at him in shock and anger and he whipped his head round to face me then started to run. I ran too, following him through the front door and down the steps The front gate opens inwards and that slowed him up. With him outside the gate and me inside it, I grabbed his arms, and held on with an adrenaline-powered grip. As we struggled the hood fell down, and long hair tumbled out.