A woman left her north London home to walk her dog only to be found dead weeks later in a portable cabin in Kent, an inquest heard.

Maintenance workers discovered Tania Da Silva , 55, locked inside a toilet cubical in the container at Pickerings Plant Ltd in New Hythe on November 21 - three weeks after she was first reported missing from her West Green home 35 miles away.

A hearing at Archbishop’s Palace in Maidstone was told the carer had died from an obstructed airway.

Mrs Da Silva, who was of Brazillian descent, was married to carpenter Valdevane Da Silva.

He said: “[On the day she disappeared] I was getting ready for work. She came next to me, she had the dog and she just said ‘I am going to the park, I will see you later.’”

After her disappearance on October 29, the Met Police combed the area around the family home and found only her dog in a nearby recreation ground.

Giving evidence, Neil Martin of Maidstone CID said its investigation discovered the portable cabin had been hired out by construction workers building a basketball court near the London park. It was not fenced off and accessible by the public.

It is likey Mrs Da Silva entered the container shortly after she went missing.

On November 7, it was collected and returned to the industrial park near Aylesford, but the body wasn’t found for another fortnight.

The cabin, also called a welfare unit, included a generator, canteen area and two portable toilets. Mrs Da Silva was found in one of these cubicles.

Dr David Rouse, a pathologist, carried out the postmortem. He said there was no evidence of third-party involvement and Mrs Da Silva had not been under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

While there was no indication, he said, of the precise time of death, he believed this would have been before the cabin was transferred back to Kent. The cause of death was an obstructed airway.

The court heard Mrs Da Silva suffered from schizophrenia and in the months leading up to her death reported hearing voices and feeling watched.

She had lost her sister to suicide in 2005 and also recently her father and brother.

She had been stressed about the prospect of a move back to Brazil and had refused to take antipsychotic medication for her condition.

Yet in a meeting with mental health professionals days before her death no serious concerns were raised.

Giving an open verdict, senior coroner Patricia Harding said while it was likely Mrs Da Silva had brought about her own death, she couldn’t be certain, on the balance of probability, she had intended to take her own life.

She amended the official cause of death to include psychotic illness as a contributing factor.

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