Safe house number five is a vacant, temporarily available flat that Erik Wilson uses for discreet meetings with infiltrators. Set within a building under renovation at Sankt Eriksplan 17, it has a second approach through the communal garden of the building opposite, entered from Vulcanusgatan 15. Its practical purpose is concealment: a meeting can be arranged by the name of an unremarkable temporary location, while visitors approach through a separate address.

Identification and Setting

Wilson calls the location number five. The flat is on the fifth floor of Sankt Eriksplan 17, where renovation has displaced the tenants. When Wilson arrives, the stairwell is dark; after failing to switch on the lights, he takes a small elevator up to a floor that has become a construction site. Inside are two rooms and a kitchen, with furniture covered by transparent plastic and brown paper protecting the floor. The details make the flat feel deliberately provisional: it is furnished enough to serve as a meeting place, but its temporary emptiness gives it no ordinary household presence.

The address is part of the concealment. Wilson reaches the flat through Sankt Eriksplan 17, while Paula is expected to come through the back door of the opposite building, at Vulcanusgatan 15. From the kitchen window, he can look over the shared garden, with its carefully raked gravel paths, outdoor furniture, two swings, and a short slide. A domestic space lies between the two entrances, allowing the meeting to be approached from either side without making the addresses interchangeable: the safe flat is in one building, and the garden access begins at the other.

Wilson's Use of the Flat

The arrangement belongs to Wilson's established method. A couple of the city's largest private landlords give him keys and work schedules for vacant flats being renovated. He uses such places to meet infiltrators and keeps each one only while it remains empty; number five has served him for just under a month, and he intends to give it up when the renovation ends and the tenants return. The safe house is therefore not a permanent base but a borrowed gap in the ordinary life of the city, its availability tied to a construction schedule and the absence of residents.

Wilson prepares the room before Paula arrives. He checks that he is alone, enters the flat, and inspects the plastic-covered furniture. He then pulls back the plastic at the kitchen window to watch the garden, opens the window, and closes it and tapes the covering back into place as Paula hurries along the gravel path. The practical routine—checking the room, watching the alternate approach, and restoring the covering—shows how the flat's usefulness depends on leaving as little sign of occupation as possible.

Meetings and Narrative Significance

The name number five carries an urgent instruction when Wilson calls Paula after midnight in Sweden. He tells her they must meet there in exactly one hour; she objects that they cannot, and he insists that they must. The exchange establishes the flat as a known rendezvous point between them, one that can be invoked briefly without reciting either street address. Its plain code name suits a meeting whose urgency is explicit but whose circumstances are not explained in the call itself.

The location's narrative force comes from the contrast between its mundane cover and its covert purpose. It is not a purpose-built safehouse but an apartment temporarily stripped of ordinary occupants, reached by two routes and watched from a kitchen window. Its usefulness lasts only until the tenants return, making secrecy depend on a narrow interval of vacancy. Within that interval, number five gives Wilson a controlled place to receive infiltrators while remaining, in the physical world, an anonymous renovation project.