***

Was it a simple murder-suicide?

A crime of twisted passion?

Greed gone wrong?

Or something more sinister?

Spying?

But if he, she or they were spies, who for?

And why?

What happened that night in December 1943 in Marlborough Woods remains one of the enduring mysteries of World War II.

ISBN: 9781626751415

GIVEN EVERYTHING ELSE GOING ON with the war and the city that fall, Haligonians, even socially well-connected ones, could be forgiven for missing the significance of the one-line social note in the Halifax Mail about yet another south-end dinner party.

The dinner party was a kind of local coming-out for the hostess, Vava Johnson, who had recently arrived from New York with her 10-year-old daughter Nadia to join her husband, Royal Navy Commander Frank Johnson.

Johnson was the paymaster for the Royal Navy’s Halifax operation. After the British had officially withdrawn from the city the year before, authorities belatedly realized they’d made a mistake. They needed a presence in the crucial convoy port of Halifax. So within months of their departure, naval administrative personnel had begun trickling back into town. By early 1943, there were 50 of them, responsible for the well-being of 4,000 locally-based and visiting British sailors—enough, certainly, to justify commissioning a new naval base. HMS Canada was headquartered in the King Edward Hotel, a refurbished former railroad hotel near the Halifax dockyard.

Johnson, 45, a heavyset man, five-feet-ten-inches tall with receding reddish blond hair and blue eyes, was one of the revent arrivals. A career naval officer, he’d previously served all over Europe, including in a naval diplomatic posting in St. Petersburg after the Great War. That was where he’d first met Vava Doodkaner.

Vava was vivacious. And mysterious. Born in the Crimea in 1906, Vava claimed she’d married a Polish nobleman, Count Peria de Gumieniak, when she was just 15. After he’d been killed in a battle near the end of World War I, Vava moved to St. Petersburg where she met Frank. They married in 1924 and, over the next 15 years, played career hopscotch all over Europe as Johnson rose through British naval ranks. Vava, who had a facility with language, claimed to have become fluent in eight different languages: Russian, Polish, Czechoslovakian, Italian, Greek, German, French and English.

Their daughter Nadia, a beautiful little girl with flashing blue eyes and long blonde hair cascading down her back in curly ringlets, was born in 1932.

By the time World War II began, Frank had been posted back to England, and the family lived in London’s posh Mayfair district. During the early days of the blitz, Vava did her patriotic duty, taking in children who’d lost their parents in the German bombing campaign. But she and her husband eventually decided war-ravaged London was no place to raise their only daughter so, early in 1940, Vava and Nadia decamped to New York where they spent the next two years living with a family friend, an American naval officer named Arthur Wills and his wife Pauline, a Russian emigré. Frank and Vava had become close enough friends with the Wills while they were both serving in Istanbul 25 years before that they’d asked them to act as Nadia’s godparents. Nadia called her Auntie Pauline.

In New York, Vava served as a volunteer with British War Relief, and collected money and clothes for the people of Russia after the Germans invaded their country. When the U.S. joined the war effort at the end of 1941, Vava helped entertain their departing troops too, playing guitar and singing at concerts aboard ships in the harbour.

Soon after Frank was appointed paymaster in Halifax, Vava and Nadia moved from New York to Halifax to join him.

Halifax was not New York. Or London.

Before the war, in fact, it had been a small-town, dowdy, down-at-the-heels east coast Canadian port city. After the war began it had become a desperately overcrowded, small-town, dowdy, down-at-the-heels east coast Canadian port city. The permanent population doubled to more than 100,000 people while hundreds of thousands of soldiers twiddled their thumbs in the city for days and weeks at a time while they waited for convoys to transport them to the war in Europe. Landlords, sensing opportunity, began renting out closets and calling them apartments. Shopkeepers, sensing a similar opportunity, jacked up their prices. The tram car system was hopelessly over-crowded and incovenient. The city’s few restuarants and movie theatres did standing-room-only business, while the line-ups for Halifax’s best known house of ill repute at 52 Hollis Street snaked for three blocks from the lieutenant-governor’s mansion to the posh Nova Scotian Hotel, the line forming shortly before noon and never ending until close to the following dawn. Unsurprisingly, the locals resented the newcomers. But no less than the newcomers resented the come from aways.

Frank and Vava’s first Halifax apartment, though located in a fashionable south-end neighbourhood, was hardly a house fit for a countess; thanks to the overcrowding, the best they could find was a one-bedroom apartment in the basement of someone else’s house.

Despite that, Vava carried herself as a woman very much to-the-manor-born. Though no longer beautiful at 37, she was nonetheless a striking woman, heavy-set, bosomy and with a commanding presence that made her difficult to ignore. She had flashing dark eyes, wore her long black hair pulled back in a bun and liked to drape dark capes over her shoulders. Her thick Russian accent only added to her aura—and Vava was keen to maintain the sense of power and privilege she projected.

Despite their cramped apartment, Vava employed a full-time maid. She even had a button under the dining room table she would often press to call for service—even from 10 feet away and even if dinner was no more formal than a borscht lunch for Nadia and a new neighbourhood friend.

To Diana Liddell, a 10-year-old who lived across the street from the Johnsons and often played with Nadia, lunches at the Johnsons’ apartment were frightening experiences. Vava sat at the head of the large dining room table and ordered the maid about. Though Liddell’s mother liked little Nadia well enough, she discouraged her daughter from spending too much time at the Johnsons. “Mrs. Johnson is just too intimidating for a little girl,” she would tell her daughter.

But Vava Johnson wasn’t interested in frightening—or impressing—little girls. She had grander ambitions. The almost incidental report in the social column of the Halifax Mail on Nov. 9—“Commander and Mrs. F. Johnson, Cartaret Street, entertained Tuesday at a delightful dinner party”—would be only the beginning, she was certain. She would become a name to be reckoned with in Halifax social circles; well known to everyone.

She would indeed.

But not in the ways she’d expected. Or hoped.

***

THE NEW NEIGHBOURS MUST BE HAVING A PARTY, David MacKeen thought to himself as he sent yet another flat rock skittering across the glassy surface of the water. One of the sailors waved to him wordlessly from the admiral’s barge as it motored slowly past his perch near the shore. Eleven-year-old David smiled, waved back. The barge was in the middle of the Northwest Arm, an inlet off Halifax harbour on the western edge of the city. David could just make out the navy officers in their dress uniforms, the women in their fancy dresses chattering among themselves as the sailors smoothly turned the vessel to the right and steered for the Johnsons’ boat dock a hundred yards down the Arm from where he stood.

The Johnsons had only moved into Dr. Fluck’s cottage from the Cartaret apartment a few months earlier but their parties were already the talk of the neighbourhood. Or at least of David’s mother and her friends. Though Mrs. Johnson had been to their house to visit a few times, David sensed his mother didn’t really approve of her. His older sister, Judy, said it was because the Johnsons were “loose living.” David didn’t know what that meant; he only knew that Nadia, their daughter, intrigued him more than any girl he’d ever met.

Nadia Johnson was a year younger than David, with a confident manner so unlike the other girls he knew. Though they went to different schools—Nadia to the Ladies College and David to Tower Road School—David had gotten to know her a little when they took riding lessons together at the Bengal Lancers, the elite horse-riding club to which all the children of everyone who was anyone in Halifax belonged.

Nadia was hard not to notice. She was what David’s father might call spunky. Once when Dick Webster, the riding instructor, said something mean about Champ, her favourite horse, Nadia picked up a clump of mud and stones and hurled it at Webster.

Nadia scared David sometimes. But he also envied her. When David’s parents had cocktail parties, he and his sister would be sent off to bed even before the guests arrived. Nadia was allowed to stay up and mingle with the grown ups. It was almost like she was a grown up herself.