A man who hid a 14-year-old girl in his loft has been jailed for child sex offences.

Manchester Crown Court heard that when Rory Beswick, 23, first met the girl, she told him she was 16.

But after he found her real age he carried on a ‘sexual relationship’ with her - ignoring repeated police warnings to stay away.

Beswick’s defence barrister told his sentencing hearing that while the responsibility lay with Beswick as an adult, the pair were ‘overwhelmed in their affection’ for one another, and that ‘his understanding was that the girl was willing and eager’ at the outset.

But the prosecution said the girl was a ‘troubled teenager’ who Beswick had groomed, plied with cannabis and cocaine, taken to hotels for sex, and filmed in intimate scenarios.

He has now been jailed for six years and three months after admitting charges of sexual activity with a child, child abduction and making indecent images of her.

Prosecutor Nicola Gatto told the court that on January 8 police concerned for her welfare called at Beswick’s home in Heywood, Rochdale.

Beswick denied she was there and a search revealed nothing - until the loft hatch fell open and police found the girl hiding up there.

By that stage the girl was in care following ‘violent skirmishes’ with her mother, who was concerned about her disappearances from the family home and drug use, and had found texts from Beswick six months earlier.

In August 2013, police warned him about his contact with her, but he denied having seen her after finding out her real age.

But Beswick continued to see her, despite being served with an abduction notice in December and being arrested in January when she was found in his loft.

Beswick claimed that after he had been served with the abduction notice, her mother had told him on the phone to ‘make sure you look after her’, and that he had taken it for approval.

Sending him down, Judge Michael Leeming said ‘no mature, sensible adult’ would take the mother’s words that way, adding, ‘if you thought you had parental approval, there would have been no need to hide the girl in the loft’.

The girl finally turned Beswick into police on January 16, and now says her ordeal left her ‘upset, stressed and angry’.

Her mother described their ordeal as ‘devastating and horrendous’, but said her daughter was no longer ‘drawn, drugged and in a terrible state’.

Phone evidence - including indecent images - contradicted Beswick’s claims that they had just had a ‘bit of a snog’.

David Bruce, defending, said Beswick had not realised the ‘enormity of what he was getting to’, but now felt remorse for his ‘unlawful relationship’ with a ‘child who had problems’.

Sending him down, Judge Leeming told Beswick, a labourer of Severn Road, Summit, he had taken ‘full advantage’ of her vulnerability for sexual gratification.

The judge added: “She had been groomed by you into thinking this was a normal and loving relationship. You were the mature adult - she was the child."