AN open verdict has been recorded on the death of a reclusive pensioner whose body was not found for a week.

Police, who were forced to break into Joyce McCowat's first-floor flat in May, found the 64-year-old's badly decomposed body on the bathroom floor, clothed in a dressing gown and slippers, and clutching an inhaler in her hand.

Pathologist Dr Campbell Ritchie told an inquest in Middlesbrough that the mummified state of the corpse meant he was unable to establish a cause of death.

Mrs McCowat, who lived in Alwent Road, Middlesbrough, had been dead for at least a week, the pathologist told Tony Eastwood, the Assistant Deputy Coroner of Teesside.

Dr Anya Heywood, who had been Mrs McCowat's GP, said the pensioner suffered from chronic obstruction of the airwaves disease and had to use inhalers continually.

She said the condition, which restricted her lung function, would have been further compromised by drinking alcohol and that Mrs McCowat could have collapsed.

Retired architect Frank Harris, a former partner of Mrs McCowat, recalled receiving a bizarre telephone call from Mrs McCowat about a fortnight before her body was found and concluded she had been drinking.

Mr Eastwood heard there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the pensioner's death.

He was told that Mrs McCowat was a recluse, who was estranged from her family and only acknowledged neighbours when she saw them.

Coroner's officer, PC Stephen Birch, said inquiries revealed Mrs McCowat had been an intensely private person who tended to ignore the outside world once she closed the front door behind her.