Bath is presented as a city where tourist routes and ordinary routines occupy the same streets. Its Abbey, bus stops, shops, homes, and public buildings give the investigation a specific urban geography: characters cross paths while working or travelling, and police activity moves from the city centre to residential streets and the Holburne Museum. The contrast between the city offered to visitors and the city inhabited by its residents shapes the setting throughout.

Tourism and the public city

Open-top tour buses are an accepted feature of Bath for most residents, though Miss Chilmark objects to them. The competing companies are easy to distinguish: Ryan's Citytour buses are red and white, while Badgerline's Bath Tour vehicles are green and cream. Citytours operate from Terrace Walk near the Abbey; Badgerline tours depart every half-hour from the bus station, using names drawn from local worthies, including Prince Bladud, King Edgar, Ralph Allen, John Wood, and Dr. William Oliver. Passengers can leave at convenient points to explore and continue their journeys on a later bus. The routes make the city's history part of a managed visitor experience, while the buses themselves provoke disagreement among residents.

Miss Chilmark's objections are personal as well as literary. She believes the upper decks allow passengers to look into bedrooms in her house, and she disapproves of Jane Austen's name appearing on a bus. Crossing Pierrepont Street at half past ten one morning, she is startled to hear her own name amplified from one of the vehicles she dislikes. The incident places her private sense of territory directly against the public movement of tourism: the bus route brings the city into her everyday life whether she welcomes it or not.

Work, streets, and daily routines

Tourism also provides seasonal employment. Shirley-Ann Miller hands out leaflets to visitors in front of the Abbey and points out the advantages of taking a bus tour. She is comfortable speaking to strangers, but the job's apparently civilized hours—ten to four—do not guarantee reliable conditions or income. Rain cancels the work, and because she is paid by the hour, a canceled shift means no pay. The uncertain, showery days are especially frustrating: she cannot know when her supervisor, Mrs. Battle, will arrive and send her home. At the end of the month, the season is due to finish, and Shirley-Ann expects to return to stacking shelves at Salisbury's if a position is still available.

Her prospects are tied to another Bath ambition. Bert urges her to seek full-time work, while she says she is waiting for him to open the private health club he has long planned. He imagines partnering with a leading hotel and installing a gym, swimming pool, steam rooms, saunas, and sunbeds; the obstacle is finance, since the bank has not agreed to a loan. The exchange connects the city's service economy to the characters' uncertain working lives: the tourist trade offers Shirley-Ann temporary wages, while Bert's hoped-for business remains contingent on borrowing.

Russell Street is both Shirley-Ann's home address and a point on the police's working map. She leaves her flat earlier than usual one morning and sees a police car arrive; Polly Wycherley later approaches her while she is working in the Abbey churchyard and asks her to take time away from the job. They walk through Church Street to the Bath Bun, a tea shop in Lilliput Court near Abbey Green. The tucked-away premises, set in a sunken court off a quieter street, are familiar to Shirley-Ann as a place to escape. When Peter Diamond and Julie Hargreaves call at her flat after five, the smell of food coming from inside makes clear that their interview interrupts an ordinary domestic moment. These encounters show how easily the investigation reaches people through the same streets and routines that structure their working day.

The city as an investigative network

The narrowboat murder quickly becomes an institutional event at Manvers Street Police Station. By midday, reports from detectives interviewing members of the Bloodhounds and preliminary findings from the Scenes of Crime team are arriving faster than two civilian operators can process them. The pressure of the case is therefore registered not only through the detectives' inquiries but through the volume of information accumulating in the incident room. Peter Diamond delegates attendance at the autopsy to Julie Hargreaves, then returns to questions about Sid Towers's history.

Bath's compact urban layout supports the investigation's movement between people and places. On one evening, Peter Diamond and Julie Hargreaves travel toward Russell Street to speak with Shirley-Ann, whom Diamond regards as unlikely to be a suspect but potentially valuable as a newcomer able to describe the Bloodhounds' relationships and tensions. Later, after failing to find Rupert at Hay Hill, they drive up Bathwick Hill to Claverton, about a mile east of the city, to interview Polly Wycherley. She lives alone at Styles, a semi-detached house on a quiet road behind the university. The shift from a city flat to a house on the outskirts extends the inquiry across different residential settings without leaving Bath's immediate orbit.

Public buildings and security

The Holburne Museum is another important point in the city's geography, and its architecture becomes relevant to police security. John Wigfull goes there late at night, parking opposite the Bath Spa Hotel and walking through Sydney Gardens rather than leaving his car close to the museum. He keeps his presence quiet, even from his own men, and enters through a side door when a sergeant opens it. The approach through the gardens and the discreet entrance make the museum a place that can be watched without drawing attention.

The building's appearance and structure complicate the task of securing it. Originally a hotel built toward the end of the eighteenth century, it resembles a country house crossed with a Greek temple, with a classical pediment and four columns above three arches. Alterations over two centuries added an extra storey and balustraded side walls. Its front opens onto Great Pulteney Street, where a low wall has replaced the former railings and two watchman's boxes are merely decorative. At the rear, drainpipes and footholds between stone blocks could help an intruder climb. Modern alarms, front floodlights, and security lights around the building counter those vulnerabilities. Wigfull checks on six officers posted inside and on the roof, contacts them by radio, and visits them every half-hour. The episode makes the museum's physical setting part of the procedural action: its elegant exterior does not itself make it secure.

Narrative significance

Bath is not simply a backdrop but a connected field of public exposure and private refuge. Tour buses carry the city's names and sights to visitors; Shirley-Ann's work places her among those visitors, while her flat and the tucked-away tea shop offer contrasting domestic and local spaces. Police work crosses these boundaries, moving from the incident room to homes and from ordinary streets to a museum kept under guard. The city's distinctive locations give the investigation practical routes, meeting places, and security problems, while its tourist economy remains visible in the routines of characters who depend on it for work.